In recent years, Augmented Reality (AR) technology has permeated various domains. This paper focuses on the critical aspect of enhancing customer interaction within AR e-commerce environments by investigating the impact of virtual product size manipulation on usability, user experience, and shopping satisfaction. We tested two manipulation modalities: an unconstrained scaling modality, enabling users to manually adjust product dimensions, and an assisted modality providing automatic 1:1 scaling. Using the Microsoft HoloLens 2 AR headset, we engaged 40 participants with small and large virtual products in shopping scenarios using these two manipulation modalities. Results show that users found the automatic manipulation modality to provide a superior user experience, being more effective, easy, useful, and pleasant when interacting with large virtual products. For small virtual products, they expressed a preference for free manipulation. Customer satisfaction with the shopping experience is positive, however, product size and manipulation modality affect the repatronage intention. The findings offer insights into designing AR e-commerce interfaces, highlighting that providing different manipulation modalities depending on the size of the products allows for enriching the shopping experience and improving the AR market potential.

Computerized solutions in the domain of creativity and expressive performance increasingly provide art and artists with exciting new opportunities. However, the combination of automation and creativity also raises controversies and resistance in some user groups. This paper considers the case of software-generated visuals in live music performance and tries to make sense of the ambivalent response given by its intended users (i.e., DJs and VJs). We carried out seven face-to-face interviews, an online survey (N = 102) and 25 interviews at a distance to unravel DJs' and VJs' positions on automated visual software. Four core controversies were eventually identified, gravitating around the implications of using such software on DJs' and VJs' identities as artists and on their competitive advantage in their activity sector. The conclusions reconnect these findings with the larger issue of understanding the users' responses to automation.

Conversations among people involve solving disputes, building common ground, and reinforce mutual beliefs and assumptions. Conversations often require external information that can support these human activities. In this paper, we study how a spoken conversation can be supported by a proactive search agent that listens to the conversation, detects entities mentioned in the conversation, and proactively retrieves and presents information related to the conversation. A total of 24 participants (12 pairs) were involved in informal conversations, using either the proactive search agent or a control condition that did not support conversational analysis or proactive information retrieval. Data comprising transcripts, interaction logs, questionnaires, and interviews indicated that the proactive search agent effectively augmented the conversations, affected the conversations' topical structure, and reduced the need for explicit search activity. The findings also revealed key challenges in the design of proactive search systems that assist people in natural conversations.

While ordinary touchscreen-based interfaces on urban explorer applications draw much of a user's attention onto the screen, visual and audio-haptic augmented reality interfaces have emerged as the two main streams for enabling direct focus on the surroundings. However, neither interface alone satisfies users in the highly dynamic urban environment. This research investigates how the two complementary augmentation can coexist on one system and how people adapt to the situation by selecting the more suitable interface. A prototype was deployed in a field experiment in which participants explored points of interest in an urban environment with both interfaces. The engagement with the surroundings was compared with a touchscreen-based application. Most participants spontaneously switched between the two interfaces, which manifests the value of the availability of both interfaces on one system. The results point at the situated advantages of either interface and reveal the users' preferences when both interfaces are available.

Previous research investigated how to leverage the new type of social data available on the web, e.g., tags, ratings and reviews, in recommending and personalizing information. However, previous works mainly focused on predicting ratings using collaborative filtering or quantifying personalized ranking quality in simulations. As a consequence, the effect of social information in user's information search and information-selection behavior remains elusive. The objective of our research is to investigate the effects of social information on users’ interactive search and information-selection behavior. We present a computational method and a system implementation combining different graph overlays: social, personal and search-time user input that are visualized for the user to support interactive information search. We report on a controlled laboratory experiment, in which 24 users performed search tasks using three system variants with different graphs as overlays composed from the largest publicly available social content and review data from Yelp: personal preferences, tags combined with personal preferences, and tags and social ratings combined with personal preferences. Data comprising search logs, questionnaires, simulations, and eye-tracking recordings show that: 1) the search effectiveness is improved by using and visualizing the social rating information and the personal preference information as compared to content-based ranking. 2) The need to consult external information before selecting information is reduced by the presentation of the effects of different overlays on the search results. Search effectiveness improvements can be attributed to the use of social rating and personal preference overlays, which was also confirmed in a follow-up simulation study. With the proposed method we demonstrate that social information can be incorporated to the interactive search process by overlaying graphs representing different information sources. We show that the combination of social rating information and personal preference information improves search effectiveness and reduce the need to consult external information. Our method and findings can inform the design of interactive search systems that leverage the information available on the social web.

Smart glasses suffer from obtrusive or cumbersome interaction techniques. Studies show that people are not willing to publicly use, for example, voice control or mid-air gestures in front of the face. Some techniques also hamper the high degree of freedom of the glasses. In this paper, we derive design principles for socially acceptable, yet versatile, interaction techniques for smart glasses based on a survey of related work. We propose an exemplary design, based on a haptic glove integrated with smart glasses, as an embodiment of the design principles. The design is further refined into three interaction scenarios: text entry, scrolling, and point-and-select. Through a user study conducted in a public space we show that the interaction technique is considered unobtrusive and socially acceptable. Furthermore, the performance of the technique in text entry is comparable to state-of-the-art techniques. We conclude by reflecting on the advantages of the proposed design.

Augmented Reality (AR) browsers show geo-referenced data in the current view of a user. When the amount of data grows too large, the display quickly becomes cluttered. Clustering items by spatial and semantic attributes can temporarily alleviate the issue, but is not effective against an increasing amount of data. We present an adaptive information density display for AR that balances the amount of presented information against the potential clutter created by placing items on the screen. We use hierarchical clustering to create a level-of-detail structure, in which nodes closer to the root encompass groups of items, while the leaf nodes contain single items. Our method selects items and groups from different levels of this hierarchy based on user-defined preferences and on the amount of visual clutter caused by placing these items. The number of presented items is adapted during user interaction to avoid clutter. We compare our interface to a conventional AR browser interface in a qualitative user study. Users clearly preferred our interface, because it provided a better overview of the data and allowed for easier comparison. In a second study, we evaluated the effect of different degrees of clustering on search and recall tasks. Users generally made fewer errors, when using our interface for a search task, which indicates that the reduced clutter allowed them to stay focused on finding the relevant items.

Locating points of interest (POIs) in cities is typically facilitated by visual aids such as paper maps, brochures, and mobile applications. However, these techniques require visual attention, which ideally should be on the surroundings. Non-visual techniques for navigating towards specific POIs typically lack support for free exploration of the city or more detailed guidance. To overcome these issues, we propose a multimodal, wearable system for alerting the user of nearby recommended POIs. The system, built around a tactile glove, provides audio-tactile cues when a new POI is in the vicinity, and more detailed information and guidance if the user expresses interest in this POI. We evaluated the system in a field study, comparing it to a visual baseline application. The encouraging results show that the glove-based system helps keep the attention on the surroundings and that its performance is on the same level as that of the baseline.

This paper presents a pervasive adventure production called Lost Lab of Professor Millennium that experimented with different kinds of interaction techniques evaluating how they affected the adventure experience. The paper further reflects on the practical organization of the production targeted for schools and students between 12 and 15 years of age. Groups of up to four teenagers navigated through thirteen different kinds of pervasive computing experiences in checkpoints sharing a device providing augmented reality (AR) (MapLens) on a physical map and an adaptive marker-based AR guidance. Based on a Professor who lost her technologies, the story of the adventure provided a unifying narrative also through her fish Linus guiding groups through a variety of tasks in the checkpoints. The production was evaluated with direct observations, different kinds of video recordings, interviews and questionnaires. The evaluation revealed how groups shared the devices and performed collaborative interactions with the devices. The production received positive feedback from all stakeholders, but in terms of feasibility had some drawbacks. The evaluation indicated that the marker-based AR guidance techniques is practical, reliable and easy-to-use, and can be also used as a storytelling or story enhancing technique.