Two-factor authentication (2FA) is a recommended or imposed authentication mechanism for valuable online assets. However, 2FA mechanisms usually exhibit user experience issues that create user friction and even lead to poor acceptance, hampering the wider spread of 2FA. In this article, we investigate user perceptions of 2FA through in-depth interviews with 42 participants, revealing key requirements that are not well met today despite recently emerged 2FA solutions. First, we investigate past experiences with authentication mechanisms emphasizing problems and aspects that hamper good user experience. Second, we investigate the different authentication factors more closely. Our results reveal particularly interesting preferences regarding the authentication factor “ownership” in terms of properties, physical realizations, and interaction. These findings suggest a path toward 2FA mechanisms with considerably better user experience, promising to improve the acceptance and hence, the proliferation of 2FA for the benefit of security in the digital world.

We present ThermoQuest, a self-contained wearable head-mounted display system for enhancing Virtual Reality experiences with temperature feedback. It’s constructed with commodity hardware elements, featuring 6 Peltier elements on the rim of the headset touching the users face. We explain the design and implementation of an affordable wearable thermal VR prototype build with commodity hardware. In a user study with 15 participants, we show evidence for a significant difference in reported presence in VR between thermal VR and control conditions (p > 0.017) in a counterbalanced experimental setup. We end with a discussion and use cases of the presented VR prototype and similar systems.

In this work we present the smart eyewear demo setup consisting of the software platform for cognitive and social interaction assessments in the wild, with several application cases and a demonstration of activity recognition in real-time. The platform is designed to work with Jins MEME, smart EOG enabled glasses, The user software is capable data logging, posture tracking and recognition of several activities, such as talking, reading and blinking. In this work we present several applications and studies that the platform has been used for.

Reading in public spaces can often be tricky if we wish to keep the contents away from the prying eye. We propose Private Reader, an eye-tracking approach towards maintaining privacy while reading by rendering only the portion of text that is gazed by the reader. We conducted a user study by evaluating for both the reader and observer in terms of privacy, reading comfort, and reading speed for three reading modes; normal, underscored, and scrambled text. "Scrambled" performs best in terms of perceived effort and frustration for the shoulder surfer. Our contribution is threefold; we developed a system to preserve privacy by rendering only the text at gaze-point of the reader, we conducted a user study to evaluate user preferences and subjective task load, and we suggested several scenarios where Private Reader is useful in public spaces.

This paper presents a sensory supplementation experience in virtual reality based on the thermal and vibrotactile feedback. We have implemented a physical system that provides hot and cold sensations around the hand and forearm of the person wearing it. After being equipped with the system the user is exposed to the virtual reality environment with the goal to deflect projectiles coming their way while relying on the thermal sensations to detect them. Presented experience makes a case for using thermal sensory supplementation as an interaction modality in virtual reality environments.

This paper presents two innovative design solutions for thermal feedback displays in virtual environments. First solution is aiming to eliminate or decrease the time delay between the user action and onset of the thermal feedback using Machine Learning for user motion prediction. Second is the design of compact but efficient water cooling system necessary to provide cold sensations using peltier elements. Presented thermal display is wearable and battery powered.