While digital play installations for outdoor use are becoming more common, little work has been done on how such technology shapes play in nature-rich environments. We performed a study of children's self-directed play with access to nature as well as digital installations. Our findings show that play with nature materials and digital installations emerged in different ways. Most notably, imaginative play was observed emerging in close interaction with nature, while the digital installations mostly inspired rule-based play. Furthermore, engagement with digital installations typically involved an active exploration phase which was not observed with nature materials. Nature materials instead engaged the children's senses more immediately, and often offered opportunities for collection and consumption, paving way for fluent play activities roaming large areas. We argue that these differences motivate rethinking the design of digital installations for play in nature and suggest guidelines to this purpose.

Outdoor play is becoming an increasingly marginalised activity in the urban landscape. Even in HCI, research on interactive solutions for outdoor play has largely been limited to special areas and in particular playgrounds. But children play everywhere, and especially play close to home is central in children's play activities. In this article we draw upon knowledge about designing for children's play in interaction design as well as in landscape architecture, to study how interactive play installations can be integrated in outdoor environments of a residential area. We present a field study in which digitally enhanced play installations were installed, in dialogue with the landscape, in between the buildings of a residential area. We focus on how emerging play activities made use of the installations as well as of the surrounding landscape in expected as well as unexpected ways. Based on the observations, we discuss how residential play is special, and how this affects how to design for it.

Children's outdoor play is fluent and fluctuating, shaped by environmental features and conditions. The article reports on a project where interaction designers and landscape architects work together to fuse their knowledge into working solutions for integrating interactive play in outdoor environments. We report on a schoolyard trial, where interactive play technology was installed as an integral part of a schoolyard environment, and discuss the interplay between technology and the environment that was partly natural forest and partly constructed playground. We highlight in particular the importance of the adaptability of the natural environment, how the combination of interactive technology and natural environment can contribute to the versatility of play activities, and how the interactive technology can both be useful for presenting invitations to play in such adaptable places, and enhance the adaptability for play in otherwise impoverished places.

The DigiFys project explores the design of interactive landscapes for children's outdoor play. The project combines landscape architecture with design of interactive technology, working towards designs that support children in their everyday play activity, close to home. In the creative lab session, we want to co-design the play landscape together with local children. The focus is on acquiring a perspective on similarities and differences between the children's play culture in Sweden where the project originates, and Malaysia.

Spatial haptic interfaces have been around for 20 years. Yet, few affordable devices have been produced, and the design space in terms of physical workspace and haptic fidelity of devices that have been produced are limited and discrete. In this paper, an open-source, open-hardware module-based kit is presented that allows an interaction designer with little electro-mechanical experience to manufacture and assemble a fully working spatial haptic interface. It also allows for modification in shape and size as well as tuning of parameters to fit a particular task or application. Results from an evaluation showed that the haptic quality of the WoodenHaptics device was on par with a Phantom Desktop and that a novice could assemble it with guidance in a normal office space. This open source starting kit, uploaded free-to-download online, affords sketching in hardware; it unsticks the hardware from being a highly-specialized and esoteric craft to being an accessible and user-friendly technology, while maintaining the feel of high-fidelity haptics.

This paper presents a study aimed at exploring the effects of different modality combinations on collaborative task performance and employed joint task-solving strategies in a shared interface. The modality combinations visual/haptic, visual/audio and visual/haptic/audio were compared in an experiment in which users solved a task together, working in pairs in adjacent rooms. The application used contained a flat surface in a 3D interface on which piles of cubes were randomly placed in a grid. The task involved scanning for empty cells and placing continuously falling cubes until all empty cells were filled. The cubes and the flat surface were designed in such a way that they could be felt and heard and thus could be recognized by different kinds of haptic and audio feedback cues. This made it possible to scan the environment and read both absolute and relative positions in the grid. A quantitative analysis of task performance and a qualitative analysis of video recordings and interview data were performed. Results showed that task completion times were significantly faster in the visual/haptic/audio condition compared with the other conditions and that there were also significantly fewer errors, result checks of one’s own actions and double checks of the partner’s actions in the visual/haptic/audio condition than in the other conditions. Qualitative results show that participants work simultaneously to a larger extent in the visual/haptic/audio condition and that less communication occurred in the visual/haptic/audio condition compared with the other conditions. We argue that more modalities improved the awareness of the environment resulting in the participants feeling more confident with their interaction in the environment in the visual/haptic/audio condition. This resulted in improved task performance. The visual/audio feedback was better suited for solving the task than the visual/haptic feedback even though haptic feedback gave a significant added value in the visual/haptic/audio condition.

In this paper a field study of using laser-pointing during multi-disciplinary medical meetings is presented. The pointing behaviour adopted by radiologists and surgeons to communicate about and collaboratively analyse patient data such as CT images today is illustrated based on field observations of pre-operative meetings. In a field test, laser-pointers were introduced in pre-operative meetings. How the dialogue and gesturing changed compared to meetings where laser-pointers were not present were investigated. Results from our study show that the multi-disciplinary medical meetings are clearly affected by the introduction of laser-pointer devices and we believe that the participants would benefit from a future gesturing tool if it was carefully designed. The implementation of an application that provides touch feedback in three dimensions of the anatomical structure of blood vessels as well as tumours is described and related to our results.

In this paper a study is presented which aimed at exploring the effects of audio feedback in a haptic and visual interface supporting collaboration among sighted and people who cannot see. A between group design was used and the participants worked in pairs with one sighted and one blindfolded in each. The application used was a haptic 3D environment in which participants could build composed objects out of building blocks. The building blocks could be picked up and moved around by means of a touch feedback pointing device. In one version of the application, used by half of the groups, sound cues could be used to tell the other person where you were, and to get feedback on your own and the other person’s actions. Results showed that sound cues together with haptic feedback made a difference in the interaction between the collaborators regarding their shared understanding of the workspace and the work process. Especially, sound cues played an important role for maintaining awareness of ongoing work – you knew what was going on, and you got a response on your own actions.

An experimental study of interaction in a collaborative desktop virtual environment is described. The aim of the experiment was to investigate if added haptic force feedback in such an environment affects perceived virtual presence, perceived social presence, perceived task performance, and task performance. A between-group design was employed, where seven pairs of subjects used an interface with graphic representation of the environment, audio connection, and haptic force feedback. Seven other pairs of subjects used an interface without haptic force feedback, but with identical features otherwise. The PHANToM, a one-point haptic device, was used for the haptic force feedback, and a program especially developed for the purpose provided the virtual environment. The program enables for two individuals placed in different locations to simultaneously feel and manipulate dynamic objects in a shared desktop virtual environment. Results show that haptic force feedback significantly improves task performance, perceived task performance, and pereceived virtual presence in the collaborative distributed environment. The results suggest that haptic force feedback increases perceived social presence, but the difference is not significant.

Four audial navigation structure conditions, designed to support a voice messaging service, each demanding a different degree of cognitive load, were assessed by 40 naive subjects in groups of 10. Three were voice-controlled: Hierarchical , Flexible (direct, no menus) and Guided (Yes/No) and one was keypad-controlled: hierarchical. Voice recognition was simulated by means of a Wizard-of-Oz set-up. The four subject groups were matched regarding spatial ability (High/ Low) as measured by the Duremann-Salde battery. Initial interaction performance was observed over six tasks, without providing the subjects with a conceptual model of the navigation structure or an appropriate command syntax. Neither number of completed tasks (4.6-5.1 out of 6), total completion time (701-849 s), nor subjective attitudes differed significantly across navigation conditions. The simple optimum path measure was significant, favouring the guided (4.1 out of 6) as compared to the flexible structure (2.5 out of 6). A significant interaction effect between total completion time and spatial ability was found. Subjects scoring high on spatial ability obtained shorter task completion time than those scoring low, except for the guided structure, where the opposite effect occurred. The results stress the importance of adapting navigating structure to specific user abilities for user environments such as telephone services. A highly guided navigation style, a structure that maximizes optimum path score, suits users with low spatial ability, especially in the initial learning phase.