Museums aim at offering personalized visits to encourage visitors to visit more than once. Few approaches consider the specific skills of museum professionals when designing tools for this purpose. We conducted a three-step iterative and user-centered design process with 13 museum professionals from six museums. This analysis led us to a main finding: the most complicated task for museum professionals is to explore their design space, composed of all possible visitor profiles for which to create visits. We propose a visualization for this multidimensional design space and six potential interactions on this representation. In an exploration space, we classify them on two axes: the selection approach and the type of interface (GUI versus TUI). We analyze their benefits and limits and, based on a pilot study, we propose insights and questions for future design.

Museums compete with the entertainment industry to attract a large audience. One solution to make them more attractive is to personalize the visits according to visitors' preferences. Following a user centered design approach with visitors and museum professionals, we designed and implemented Build Your Own Hercules. This tangible prototype helps groups of visitors or individuals choose a visit based on their characteristics and desires. A pilot study in the museum provided first insights about the ease of use, satisfaction and interest within visitor groups.

The persistent difficulty to develop and maintain interactive software has unveiled the inadequacy of traditional imperative programming languages. In the recent years, several solutions have been proposed to enrich the existing languages with constructs dedicated to interaction. In this paper, we propose a different approach that takes interaction as the primary concern to build a new programming language. We present Djnn, a conceptual framework based on the concepts of process and process activation, then we introduce Smala a programming language derived from this framework. We propose a solution for the unification of the concepts of event and data-flow, and for the derivation of complex control structures from a small set of basic ones. We detail the syntax and the semantics of Smala. Finally, we illustrate through a real-size application how it enables building all parts of an interactive software. Djnn and Smala may offer designers and programmers usable means to think of interactions and translate them into running code.

Numerous interaction devices are designed through device composition. However, there is no conceptual support for this process and designers are left out to explore the space of combinations in an ad-hoc manner. In this paper we propose a design space for device composition, DECO, which focuses on the physical aspects of the composition. This design space is built around two main axes, namely Physical arrangement, which describes how elements are physically combined, and Physical manipulation, which describes how users manipulate each element. We first classify existing devices using our design space and then compare four of them to illustrate their similarities and differences. Using DECO, we design a new compound device: RPM2. This device is based on the combination of a regular mouse with the Roly-Poly Mouse. We describe in detail the user-centered iterative design process that leads to the final prototype. Finally we propose a set of design guidelines to assist the use of DECO for device composition.

We present the design and evaluation of the Roly-Poly Mouse (RPM), a rolling input device that combines the advantages of the mouse (position displacement) and of 3D devices (roll and rotation) to unify 2D and 3D interaction. Our first study explores RPM gesture amplitude and stability for different upper shapes (Hemispherical, Convex) and hand postures. 8 roll directions can be performed precisely and their amplitude is larger on Hemispherical RPM. As minor rolls affect translation, we propose a roll correction algorithm to support stable 2D pointing with RPM. We propose the use of compound gestures for 3D pointing and docking, and evaluate them against a commercial 3D device, the SpaceMouse. Our studies reveal that RPM performs 31% faster than the SpaceMouse for 3D pointing and equivalently for 3D rotation. Finally, we present a proof-of-concept integrated RPM prototype along with discussion on the various technical challenges to overcome to build a final integrated version of RPM.