Conversational agents are increasingly becoming digital partners of our everyday computing experiences offering a variety of purposeful information and utility services. Although rich on competency, these agents are entirely oblivious to their users' situational and emotional context today and incapable of adjusting their interaction style and tone contextually. To this end, we present a mixed-method study that informs the design of a situation- and emotion-aware conversational agent for kinetic earables. We surveyed 280 users, and qualitatively interviewed 12 users to understand their expectation from a conversational agent in adapting the interaction style. Grounded on our findings, we develop a first-of-its-kind emotion regulator for a conversational agent on kinetic earable that dynamically adjusts its conversation style, tone, volume in response to users emotional, environmental, social and activity context gathered through speech prosody, motion signals and ambient sound. We describe these context models, the end-to-end system including a purpose-built kinetic earable and their real-world assessment. The experimental results demonstrate that our regulation mechanism invariably elicits better and affective user experience in comparison to baseline conditions in different real-world settings.

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We present eSense - an open and multi-sensory in-ear wearable platform for personal-scale behaviour analytics. eSense is a true wireless stereo (TWS) earbud and supports dual-mode Bluetooth and Bluetooth Low Energy. It is also augmented with a 6-axis in-ertial measurement unit and a microphone. We demonstrate the eSense platform, the data exploration tool with the open APIs for the real-time visualisation of multi-modal sensory data, and its manifestation in a 360° workplace well-being application.

360° videos are a new kind of medium that gives the viewers a sense of real immersion as they glimpse the action from all angles and directions. Naturally, professional and amateur film-makers are actively adopting this new medium for transformative storytelling. Despite this phenomenal progress in 360° video creation, current understanding on users' viewing experience of these videos is limited. In this paper, we present the first comparative study on the user experience with 360° videos on mobile devices using different interaction techniques. We observed 18 participants' interaction with six 360°videos with different viewport characteristics (static or moving) on a smartphone, a tablet and a head mounted display (HMD) respectively and measured how they interact with the content. We then conducted semi-structured interviews with the participants in which they explained their interaction with and viewing experience of 360° videos across three devices. Our findings show that 360° videos with moving viewports elicit higher engagement from the viewers, and offer superior viewing experience. However, these videos are cognitively demanding and require constant user attention. Our participants preferred the condition with dynamic peephole interaction on a smartphone for watching 360° videos due to the simplicity in exploration and familiarity with navigation controls. Many participants reported that the HMD offers the most immersive experience however it comes at the expense of higher cognitive burden, motion sickness and physical discomfort.

Face-to-face interactions have proven to accelerate team and larger organisation success. Many past research has explored the benefits of quantifying face-to-face interactions for informed workplace management, however to date, little attention has been paid to understand how the feedback on interaction behaviour is perceived at a personal scale. In this paper, we offer a reflection on the automated feedback of personal interactions in a workplace through a longitudinal study. We designed and developed a mobile system that captured, modelled, quantified and visualised face-to-face interactions of 47 employees for 4 months in an industrial research lab in Europe. Then we conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 employees to understand their perception and experience with the system. Our findings suggest that the short-term feedback on personal face-to-face interactions was not perceived as an effective external cue to promote self-reflection and that employees desire long-term feedback annotated with actionable attributes. Our findings provide a set of implications for the designers of future workplace technology and also opens up avenues for future HCI research on promoting self-reflection among employees.

We offer a reflection on the technology usage for workplace quantification through an in the wild study. Using a prototype Quantified Workplace system equipped with passive and participatory sensing modalities, we collected and visualized different workplace metrics (noise, color, air quality, self reported mood, and self reported activity) in two European offices of a research organization for a period of 4 months. Next we surveyed 70 employees to understand their engagement experience with the system. We then conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 employees in which they explained which workplace metrics are useful and why, how they engage with the system and what privacy concerns they have. Our findings suggest that sense of inclusion acts as the initial incentive for engagement which gradually translates into a habitual routine. We found that incorporation of an anonymous participatory sensing aspect into the system could lead to sustained user engagement. Compared to past studies we observed a shift in the privacy concerns, due to the trust and transparency of our prototype system. We conclude by providing a set of design principles for building future Quantified Workplace systems.