TurkDeck is an immersive virtual reality system that reproduces not only what users see and hear, but also what users feel. TurkDeck produces the haptic sensation using props, i.e., when users touch or manipulate an object in the virtual world, they simultaneously also touch or manipulate a corresponding object in the physical world. Unlike previous work on prop-based virtual reality, however, TurkDeck allows creating arbitrarily large virtual worlds in finite space and using a finite set of physical props. The key idea behind TurkDeck is that it creates these physical representations on the fly by making a group of human workers present and operate the props only when and where the user can actually reach them. TurkDeck manages these so-called "human actuators" by displaying visual instructions that tell the human actuators when and where to place props and how to actuate them. We demonstrate TurkDeck at the example of an immersive 300m2 experience in 25m2 physical space. We show how to simulate a wide range of physical objects and effects, including walls, doors, ledges, steps, beams, switches, stompers, portals, zip lines, and wind. In a user study, participants rated the realism/immersion of TurkDeck higher than a traditional prop-less baseline condition (4.9 vs. 3.6 on 7 item Likert).

We introduce the concept of tangibles that users can manipulate with their feet. We call them kickables. Unlike traditional tangibles, kickables allow for very large interaction surfaces as kickables reside on the ground. The main benefit of kickables over other foot-based modalities, such as foot touch, is their strong affordance, which we validate in two user studies. This affordance makes kickables well-suited for walk-up installations, such as tradeshows or museum exhibits.

There is a great demand for hands-on training in engineering education. In the context of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), assessing these experiments manually by teaching assistants is not possible owed to the high number of participants and the resulting workload for the teaching team. Systems for machine-based assessment of coding tasks are existing, but not necessarily available publicly, or not prepared to handle the massive amount of users in a MOOC. Definitely, they are not available “ad hoc”, but require a certain amount of effort to be integrated in the MOOC platform or to be made available for the students in another way. Time and money to provide the required effort is not always available. This work presents a lightweight solution for the assessment of practical programming exercises, based on third party online coding tools. The solution was introduced as a part of openHPI's Web-Technologies course. The basic idea is to prepare a task in an available online tool, along with a piece of code that is able to evaluate the participant's solution. In case of success the participant is provided with a password, which in return serves as the answer for a fill-in-the-gap question in a standard quiz as provided by the openHPI MOOC platform, and thus allows for automatic online assessment based on practical coding exercises.