Group sports such as cycling promote a healthy lifestyle and contribute to an active social life among individuals with a common interest. HCI research has mainly focused on supporting individual riders like commuters, young children learning to ride safely, and tourists using bikes. In this work, we present the results of a study exploring the work done by road cyclists while training together, following a Contextual Design methodology involving participants from three different cycling groups across different geographic regions. We share their strategies and challenges with group coordination and communication, and uncover a lack of support for sharing individual metrics such as effort in common tools.

Very large floor displays can promote engaging public experiences, but incur perspective-related warping, making it challenging to comprehend and interact with distal objects when standing on the display. We introduce a perspective compensated view technique that maintains the relative size and shape of objects as they move away from the viewer, and explore the technique in SpaceHopper, a large-scale, floor-projected version of the game Asteroids. Players bounce on a hopper ball to control their ship in one of two control modes: bounce to repel or bounce to shoot. We evaluated SpaceHopper in a field experiment with 59 participants, finding that perspective compensated view yielded longer playing times (and higher scores) in the bounce to fire modality. Bystanders were highly engaged with players and also seemed to be unaware of the perspective warping, suggesting that visually compensating for the interactor’s perspective does not adversely impact the enjoyment of passive participants and audience members, at least under some circumstances.

Museums are constantly searching for new ways to increase engagement with their exhibits, from electronic guides to modern digital technologies such as special-purpose tablets, smartphones, and virtual and augmented reality (AR). For AR exhibits in particular, promoting shared experience and group cohesion is not straightforward. In this work, we investigate scenarios in which not everyone is using a head-worn display (HWD), either because there aren't enough available or simply because someone might feel uncomfortable using it. We propose two sharing techniques for AR experiences and evaluate them in a long term in-the-wild study: Over-the-Shoulder AR, which renders a real-time virtual representation of the augmented reality content on a large secondary display; Semantic Linking, which displays contextual information about the virtual content on the same large display. We also introduce a complementary technique: Indicator Rings, which display the locations of the HWD user's objects-of-focus. We observed that participants in the Over-the-Shoulder AR and Semantic Linking conditions stayed together and exhibited more verbal exchanges than participants in a Baseline condition, which could indicate that they were more engaged. Self-reported measures indicated an increase in pair communication and increased comprehension of the virtual content for participants without the HWD. Participants without the HWD also displayed a greater understanding of the location of virtual elements with support from the Indicator Rings, and used them as a tool to guide the HWD user through the virtual content. We discuss design implications for interactive augmented reality exhibits and possible applications outside the cultural heritage scenario.

In the context of the 3DUI Contest promoted by the IEEE VR 2018, we propose 3D interaction techniques that address three distinct tasks in a virtual environment setup: climbing a ladder, controlling a quadcopter in a first-person view flight, and building a tower by stacking a series of objects. The interaction techniques were developed so the player, our 3D-athlete, has control over the events in each task, following metaphors that facilitate the use of the interface, and having status and spatial awareness supported by clear feedback cues. Thus, the player should be able to execute the tasks with precision and agility.