In the age of mobile communications and social media, users are connected to interact with other people, and often obliged to be socially active as technology drives to connect us. In this paper, we harness the technology for the opposite use: helping people to avoid company instead of encouraging interaction. We have developed the concept of an asocial hiking application (app), in which users can generate routes that avoid meeting other people. We developed the concept based on user feedback data derived from an online survey (n=157) and two focus groups, and created a tool that generates solitary hiking routes based on OpenStreetMap data and additional information from the web. In addition, to make the application react to dynamic changes in the environment, we developed a mobile application prototype that scans Wi-Fi signals to detect other hikers nearby and warn of their approach. The prototype was tested and evaluated with 8 hikers in-the-wild. In addition to the concept design and the functional prototype, we present findings on people's, especially hikers, need for solitude, and introduce user feedback from each stage of the prototype design process as well as design recommendations for an asocial navigation application.

The entertainment industry is going through a transformation, and technology development is affecting how we can enjoy and interact with the entertainment media content in new ways. In our work, we explore how to enable interaction with content in the context of 3D cinemas. This allows viewers to use their mobile phone to retrieve, for example, information on the artist of the soundtrack currently playing or a discount coupon on the watch the main actor is wearing. We are particularly interested in the user experience of the interactive 3D cinema concept, and how different interactive elements and interaction techniques are perceived. We report on the development of a prototype application utilizing smart phones and on an evaluation in a cinema context with 20 participants. Results emphasize that designing for interactive cinema experiences should drive for holistic and positive user experiences. Interactive content should be tied together with the actual video content, but integrated into contexts where it does not conflict with the immersive experience with the movie.

We present an interactive cinema concept, where the audience can interact with the movie through an interactive pillow. We report on a background study (n=30) and a study evaluating a simulated tangible UI concept (n=10). Our findings indicate that tangible UIs have potential as a non-distractive interaction medium, e.g. as they don't create light pollution, can be used in different postures, and allow detection of spontaneous input actions such as squeezing. The results also show that people are interested in seeing records of not only their own performance, but also of the reactions and highlights experienced by their fellow spectators.

Mobile stereoscopic 3D (S3D) user experience (UX) design has not yet been widely studied. Stereoscopy in today's products is used for visual design purposes, whilst the potential for holistic interaction design and utilitarian aspects have been neglected. In this paper we introduce the design, implementation and evaluation of a mobile S3D phonebook application. In the application stereoscopy was used to augment the 2D user interface (UI) design to provide information related to the time when the last call with each phonebook contact was made. We describe the results of the pilot study charting the design directions, laboratory study of first impressions, and results of a field trial, where 21 participants used the application for a few days. The S3D UI design provoked first impressions related to entertainment and 2D UI to practical qualities, whereas the field study showed that our S3D phonebook design successfully demonstrated that utilitarian value can be incorporated to the design.

In this paper, we describe our demonstration utilizing an urban landmark, a monument in a city center, for interaction. The City Mouse is an interactive media installation, where the participants rotate a 3D model of the Earth presented on a screen by rolling a large stone ball resting on a water fountain in a stone slab. During a public trial, approximately a hundred people interacted with the system. We demonstrate how an existing landmark in urban spaces can be used in an interactive experience, and report the experiences with the installation. We present how the communal ownership, associations and existing practices were connected to the successful design of the media installation.

In this paper, we present our co-creation work on a digital 3D city model, where school children were asked create drawings for the city landscape of their hometown. Altogether 40 drawings were then integrated into the 3D virtual world model to form a decorated 3D view of the city square and the main street. Our work presents a novel use case in using the local 3D city model as a creativity platform for children, opening a new viewpoint on how virtual world presentations can be used with e.g. to facilitate the perception of the local community.

Mobile user interfaces (UIs) utilizing stereoscopic 3D have so far been driven predominantly by visual design, and when interaction design has been considered, the focus has been on single user use cases. In this paper, we introduce a novel way to utilize stereoscopy in a mobile user interface in a collaborative task. We define a shared space, appearing below the screen level, which is used in a collaborative task of sharing mobile phone photos. Two users are able to share content by moving items between the private layer, at zero parallax, and shared layer, at positive parallax. We developed the application through an iterative design process including two user studies (n=27, n=19). We report positive evaluation results especially in regard of the utilitarian aspects of the UI design.

In this paper, we focus on charting future ubiquitous computing use cases utilizing mixed reality (MR) in domestic environments, which has so far been an unexplored domain for MR. We describe our early user research, where during one week participants from 12 households were asked to brainstorm and assess their perceptions of imaginary mixed reality in their homes. During the one-week period this resulted in 167 user generated concept ideas. We focus on the thematic findings that emerged from the collected material, and describe how people most often related the potential of MR concepts with applications related to wellbeing, home-related information, communication and entertainment.

During recent years augmented reality services have become commonly known. To ensure the acceptance of these services, their development should be based on the users' expectations and needs. In this paper, we investigate the initial user perceptions of service content in a mobile mixed reality (MMR) application through a two-phase user study, where early concept ideas were charted. We conducted a field study with 35 participants, and an online survey filled out by 111 people. Our findings provide indication of desired content types and differences between local and visiting people.