Advances in display technologies are transforming the capabilities—and potential applications—of system interfaces. Previously, the overwhelming majority of systems have utilised rectangular displays; this may soon change with digital devices increasingly designed to be ubiquitous and pervasive, to facilitate frictionless human interaction. At present, software is invariably designed assuming it will be used with a display of a specific shape; however, there is an emerging demand for systems built around interacting with tabletop interfaces to be capable of handling a wide range of potential display shapes. In this paper, the design of software for use on a range of differently shaped tabletop displays is considered, proposing a novel but extensible technique that can be used to minimise the influence of the issues of using different display shapes. Furthermore, we present a study that applies the technique to adapt several software applications to several different display shapes.

The increasing availability of intensely immersive virtual, augmented and mixed reality experiences using head-mounted displays (HMD) has prompted deliberations about the ethical implications of using such technology to resolve technical issues and explore the complex cognitive, behavioral and social dynamics of human `virtuality'. However, little is known about the impact such immersive experiences will have on children (aged 0-18 years). This paper outlines perspectives on child development to present conceptual and practical frameworks for conducting ethical research with children using immersive HMD technologies. The paper addresses not only procedural ethics (gaining institutional approval) but also ethics-in-practice (on-going ethical decision-making).

We present techniques for automatically identifying relationships between rigidly linked 6DoF and 3DoF sensors belonging to different sensor systems. The techniques allow for subsequent automatic alignment of the sensor systems, increasing the usability of modular sensor systems. Two techniques are presented and analysed in simulation and a case study for performance under varying noise and latency conditions. Good results were achieved, with each sensor identified correctly in at least 60% of estimates, or 4 times greater than random selection. After a sample collection period of around 5 seconds, the matching is performed in less than 5ms and is scalable to noisier systems by using more samples. Our methods represent a key step in creating highly accessible modular multi-device 3D systems.

Realistic non-player characters (NPC) are an important component of virtual environments. However, generating NPCs with humanlike behaviour can be difficult. A previously proposed pipeline used evacuation simulators to generate domain relevant NPC behaviour for virtual environments. However, the NPCs generated through this process had static behaviours and could not dynamically change pre-computed evacuation paths. In this paper, we extend this pipeline with an approach that supports path switching for NPCs in four situations and demonstrates the pipeline in a virtual environment modelled on a large real building. A scalability test on the large building showed overall evacuation time in both source evacuation simulator and target virtual environment was consistent regardless of building size and complexity. Three test-cases demonstrate path switching for NPCs with increasing evacuation success rates through different situations. The reuse of static paths to enable dynamic NPC behaviour supports ongoing work to develop low cost and realistic training systems using game engine technology.

SUMMARY Multi‐touch driven user interfaces are becoming increasingly prevalent because of their intuitiveness and because of the reduction in the associated hardware costs. In recognition of this trend, multi‐touch software frameworks (MSFs) have begun to emerge. These frameworks abstract the low level issues of multi‐touch software development and deployment. MSFs therefore enable software developers who are unfamiliar with the complexities of multi‐touch software development to implement and deploy multi‐touch applications more easily. However, some multi‐touch applications have real‐time system requirements, and at present, no MSFs provide support for the development and deployment of such real‐time multi‐touch applications. The implication of this is that software developers are unable to take advantage of MSFs and, therefore, are forced to handle the complexities of multi‐touch and real‐time systems development and deployment for themselves in an ad hoc manner. The primary consequence of this is that the multi‐touch and/or real‐time aspects of the application may not function correctly. In this paper, guidelines are presented for applying real‐time system concepts to support the development and deployment of real‐time multi‐touch applications using MSFs. This serves to increase the probability that the application will meet its timing requirements while also reducing the complexity of the development and deployment process associated with multi‐touch applications. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Haptic feedback can help users achieve physically tangible interactions which could potentially improve electronic shopping. A set of haptic experiments were conducted to evaluate a number of thresholds for optimum discrimination across three sets of haptic weight ranges. Each set of the weight ranges (i.e. Low, Medium, and High) will have an optimum discrimination threshold for relative weight comparisons. Results showed that 20% provided optimum discrimination threshold for Medium weights (1.07N - 1.75N), whereas High weights (1.92N - 2.60N) need at least 10%. Moreover, 40% provided optimum discrimination threshold for Low weights (0.22N - 0.90N). Also, 0% discrimination threshold accompanied by relatively higher thresholds (i.e. 30% and 40%) has improved its perception across all three sets of weight ranges but its optimal performance was at Low weight ranges. These results can be a foundation for designers of haptic applications to (i) use relative weights for products comparison with increased consistency and (ii) to identify the upper level constraints on the number of products that can be simultaneously compared on each set of weight ranges.

Simulated medical environments allow clinical staff to practice medical procedures for longer than traditional training methods without endangering patients. Haptic devices are a key technology in such systems but it is unclear how their usability can be evaluated. A user study has been performed with a commercial haptic-based medical virtual environment using data logging, user questionnaires and a modified think-aloud verbal protocol to support usability analysis. However, the evaluator does not share the haptic feedback with the participant and it was found that this can be problematic in shaping questions during an evaluation session and interpreting the collected data.

There are many toolkits and development environments that aid the process of constructing virtual environment applications. Many of these development environments encourage customising a virtual environment's design while rapid prototyping within the confines of a toolkit's capabilities. Thus the choice of the technology and its associated support has been made independent of the end‐use requirements of the final system. This can bias a virtual environment's design by implementation based constraints. We propose that an alternative approach is the consideration of virtual environment requirements in the context of an inspectable design model, to identify the requirements that a toolkit will need to support. In the context of an example, we present a selection of design requirements that we consider important for virtual environment design in general. We explore how these requirements might be mapped to different capabilities using Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML) as a concrete example of a platform technology.

Much of the work concerned with virtual environments has addressed the development of new rendering technologies or interaction techniques. As the technology matures and becomes adopted in a wider range of applications, there is, however, a need to better understand how this technology can be accommodated in software engineering practice. A particular challenge presented by virtual environments is the complexity of the interaction that is supported, and sometimes necessary, for a particular task. Methods such as finite‐state automata which are used to represent and design dialogue components for more conventional interfaces, e.g. using direct manipulation within a desktop model, do not seem to capture adequately the style of interaction that is afforded by richer input devices and graphical models. In this paper, we suggest that virtual environments are, fundamentally, what are known as hybrid systems. Building on this insight, we demonstrate how techniques developed for modelling hybrid systems can be used to represent and understand virtual interaction in a way that can be used in the specification and design phases of software development, and which have the potential to support prototyping and analysis of virtual interfaces.

A scheme for domain and task representation in an interactive learning environment is described. The approach, based on recent enhancements to a classic AI planning formulation, enables suitable feedback to be incorporated economically into tutors for a range of procedural domains. The method is applied to the problem of simulating the operation of a video cassette recorder and representing tasks within this domain.>