Hybrid gifting combines physical artefacts and experiences with digital interactivity to generate new kinds of gifts. Our review details how gifting is a complex social phenomenon and how digital gifting is less engaging than physical gifting for both givers and receivers. Employing a Research Through Design approach, we developed a portfolio of four hybrid gifting experiences: an augmented advent calendar; edible music tracks; personalized museum tours; and a narrated city walk. Our reflection addresses three concepts: hybrid wrapping where physical gifts become wrapped in digital media and vice versa; the importance of effortful interactions that are visible and pleasurable; and the need to consider social obligation, including opportunities for acknowledgement and reciprocation, dealing with embarrassment, and recognizing the distinction between giving and sharing. Our concepts provide guidance to practitioners who wish to design future gifting experiences while helping HCI researchers engage with the concept of gifting in a nuanced way.

Interactive mirrors, typically combining semi-transparent mirrors, digital screens and interaction mechanisms have been developed for a variety of application areas. Drawing on existing techniques to create interactive mirror spaces, we investigated their performative qualities through artistic discovery and collaborative prototyping. We document a linked set of design explorations and two public, site-specific experiences that brought together artists, communities, and HCI researchers. We illustrate the abstracted interactive mirror space that practitioners in the performance art, theatre and museum sectors can work with. In turn, we also discuss six performative design strategies concerning the use of physical context, movement and narrative that HCI researchers who wish to deploy interactive mirrors in more mainstream settings need to consider.

Through sensors carried by people and sensors embedded in the environment, personal data is being processed to try to understand activity patterns and people's internal states in the context of human-building interaction. This data is used to actuate adaptive buildings to make them more comfortable, convenient, and accessible or information rich. In a series of envisioning workshops, we queried the future relationships between people, personal data and the built environment, when there are no technical limits to the availability of personal data to buildings. Our analysis of created designs and user experience fictions allows us to contribute a systematic exposition of the emerging design space for adaptive architecture that draws on personal data. This is being situated within the context of the new European information privacy legislation, the EU General Data Protection Regulation 2016. Drawing on the tension space analysis method, we conclude with the illustration of the tensions in the temporal, spatial, and inhabitation-related relationships of personal data and adaptive buildings, re-usable for the navigation of the emerging, complex issues by future designers.

The convergence of theatre and digital technologies can play a valuable role in theatre for early years, but, how an audience of under-5's experiences and engages with these spaces is largely unexplored. We present an interactive performance installation and demonstrate how concepts from early years practice, in particular schemas, children's repeated play patterns, can be used as a design framework. We integrated sensors and microcontrollers into objects, puppets, and scenography and invited eight groups of very young children and their grownups to explore the performance. We discuss how schemas useful as a design and analysis tool in TEY, how schemas need to be expanded to include multi-sensory interactions with hybrid physical-digital objects, and how designers need to consider the roles of adults who scaffold interaction between very young children and their surroundings.

A myriad of digital artifacts are routinely exchanged online. While previous studies suggest that these are sometimes considered to be gifts, CSCW has largely overlooked explicit digital gifting where people deliberately choose to give digital media as gifts. We present an interview study that systematically analyzes the nature of digital gifting in comparison to conventional physical gifting. A five-stage gift exchange model, synthesized from the literature, frames this study. Findings reveal that there are distinctive gaps in people's engagement with the digital gifting process compared to physical gifting. Participants' accounts show how digital gifts often involve less labor, are sometimes not perceived as gifts by the recipient and are rarely reflected on and reciprocated. We conclude by drawing out design implications for digital gifting services and rituals.

Computing has become an established part of the built environment augmenting it to become adaptive.We generally assume that we control the adaptive environments we inhabit.Using an existing adaptive environment prototype, we conducted a controlled study testing how the reversal of control (where the environment attempts to influence the behaviour of the inhabitant) would affect participants.Most participants changed their respiratory behaviour in accordance with this environmental manipulation.Behavioural change occurred either consciously or unconsciously.We explain the two different paths leading participants to behavioural change: (i) we adapt the model of interbodily resonance, a process of bodily interaction observable between, for example, partners engaged in verbal dialogue, to describe the unconscious bodily response to subtle changes in the environment and (ii) we apply the model of secondary control, an adjustment of one's own expectations to maintain the pretence of control, to describe conscious cognitive adaptation to the changing environment.We also discuss potential applications of our findings in therapeutic and other settings. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS• We describe an experimental study of the control relationship in biofeedback environments.• Inhabitants on average synchronize their physiological behaviour when they lose control over the environment.• Inhabitant behaviour is explained through a form of interbodily resonance and secondary control.• We see potential therapeutic uses of combining biofeedback and automated control.

Both breathing and internal self-awareness are an integral part of any yoga practice. We describe and discuss the development of ExoPranayama, an actuated environment that physically manifests users’ breathing in yoga. Through a series of trials with yoga practitioners and expert teachers, we explore its role in the practice of yoga. Our interview results reveal that biofeedback through the environment supported teaching and improved self-awareness, but it impacted group cohesion. Two practical uses of the technology emerged for supporting breath control in yoga: (1) biofeedback can provide new information about users’ current internal states; (2) machine - driven feedback provides users with a future state or goal and leads to improved cohesiveness.

This paper introduces FugaciousFilm, a soap film based touch display, as a platform for Attentive Interaction that encourages the user to be highly focused throughout the use of the interface. Previous work on ephemeral user interfaces has primarily focused on the development of ambient and peripheral displays. In contrast, FugaciousFilm is an ephemeral display that aims to promote highly attentive interaction. We present the iterative process of developing this interface, spanning technical explorations, prototyping and a user study. We report lessons learnt when designing the interface; ranging from the soap film mixture to the impact of frames and apertures. We then describe developing the touch, push, pull and pop interactions. Our user study shows how FugaciousFilm led to focused and attentive interactions during a tournament of enhanced Tic-Tac-Toe. We then finish by discussing how the principles of vulnerability and delicacy can motivate the design of attentive ephemeral interfaces.

Urban screens are becoming a common element of our city landscape. As such they offer new ways of connecting people that occupy public space, e.g., by taking situated snapshots through a display-attached camera. In this paper we present a first longitudinal case study of 12 weeks of such an application -- Moment Machine -- deployed "in the wild" on an urban screen facing the street. We report findings from 1189 photos taken, 13 interviews, and 3 weeks of observations that show engagement stimulated by situated snapshots within a place-based community where the screen is located. We also analyze interaction log files to describe how often users interacted, what type of interactions they had and how long they lasted, and overall engagement on a weekly basis and throughout the week. Based on our experience, we provide three take-away snippets for designers of similar urban screen experiences.

The Creativity Bento Box is a physical resource pack, designed to support casual social interaction and break taking in an intensive, computer-mediated social activity. It was developed within the Creativity Greenhouse project, which piloted a mechanism to create research proposals and distribute funding at a distance. This involved facilitated phases of collaboration and competition over multiple days of computer-mediated work, where participants communicate and interact through a virtual world. During the iterative development process, the lack of time for socializing, the intense focus on virtual resources, and a lack of time spent away from the screen were reported as negative issues in feedback from participants. This article reports on the development of the Creativity Bento Box and how it helped to address these issues. By providing physical resources that contrasted with the properties of the virtual world, it supported people to socialize and take breaks from their primary activity, allowed them to include physical space and artifacts in their interactions, and provoked moves away from the otherwise intense focus on the computer. The article reflects on the roles of the Bento Box as a gift, in bridging between physical and virtual contexts, its higher suitability during the earlier phases of ideation and group development, and its perception by participants as something “framed.” Through this, we highlight the underexplored potential of using physical, offline resources as a means to solve difficulties in distanced social interactions.

In collaborative video communication systems, establishing co-orientation around physical objects, virtual objects and people is a critical requirement. This is problematic as the technical limitations of video fractures the display of conduct in the connected environments. We present the results of a study of one collaborative system, CamBlend, which aims to alleviate some of these problems by using screen based pointing tools to both physical spaces and virtual resources. We report on how participants achieved co-orientation when using this system. We relate these findings to previous research into the fractured ecologies of collaborative spaces, describing how the form and nature of fractures in CamBlend differ from earlier reported work.

The term Ubiquitous Monitoring aims to capture the unprecedented degree to which data collection will occur in the future through ongoing developments in embedded, wireless and sensory technologies. Intelligent buildings represent the most current instantiations of this technology in the form of building management/automation systems. However, there is an emerging field of research called adaptive architecture, which aims to explore more meaningful and direct interactions between occupants and their environments. In this paper, we use the experience of a prototype adaptive/biofeedback architecture called ExoBuilding as a probe to explore user attitudes towards future monitoring systems in buildings. We present results from a semi-structured interview, which encouraged participants to envision future monitoring technologies, making projections based on their real experiences with ExoBuilding.

CamBlend is a new focus-in-context panoramic video collaboration system designed to facilitate the interaction with and around objects in a lightweight, flexible package. As well as the ability to view very high resolution local and remote video that covers a full 180#176; field of view, the system contains a number of tools which facilitate bi-directional pointing between two remote spaces. In the first quasi-naturalistic exploratory study on a focus-in-context video system, we show a number of unique object referencing behaviours, including un-intentional or 'implicit' pointing and a number of scenarios where this was advantageous. Additionally the study highlighted some of the problems inherent in aligning between screen-based and real-world perspectives.

Our surroundings are becoming infused with sensors measuring a variety of data streams about the environment, people and objects. Such data can be used to make the spaces that we inhabit responsive and interactive. Personal data in its different forms are one important data stream that such spaces are designed to respond to. In turn, one stream of personal data currently attracting high levels of interest in the HCI community is physiological data (e.g., heart rate, electrodermal activity), but this has seen little consideration in building architecture or the design of responsive environments. In this context, we developed a prototype mapping a single occupant’s respiration to its size and form, while it also sonifies their heartbeat. The result is a breathing building prototype, formative trials of which suggested that it triggers behavioral and physiological adaptations in inhabitants without giving them instructions and it is perceived as a relaxing experience. In this paper, we present and discuss the results of a controlled study of this prototype, comparing three conditions: the static prototype, regular movement and sonification and a biofeedback condition, where the occupant’s physiological data directly drives the prototype and presents this data back to them. The study confirmed that the biofeedback condition does indeed trigger behavioral changes and changes in participants’ physiology, resulting in lower respiration rates as well as higher respiration amplitudes, respiration to heart rate coherence and lower frequency heart rate variability. Self-reported state of relaxation is more dependent on inhabitant preferences, their knowledge of physiological data and whether they found space to ‘let go’. We conclude with a discussion of ExoBuilding as an immersive but also sharable biofeedback training interface and the wider potential of this approach to making buildings adapt to their inhabitants.

The novel experience Anywhere allowed participants to explore an urban area, tying together information not normally available, new points of views and interaction embedded into physical places. Guided by 'unseen', on-the-street performers in an ongoing conversation maintained over mobile phones, they gained access to locative media and staged performances. Our analysis demonstrates how Anywhere produced engaging and uniquely personalised paths through a complex landscape of content, negotiated by the performer-participant pair around various conflicting constraints. We reflect our analysis through the lens of the key characteristics exhibited by mechanisms that support city exploration, before focussing on possible extensions to the technological support of teams of professional and amateur guides.

This paper presents the evolution of a tool to support the rapid prototyping of hybrid museum experiences by domain professionals. The developed tool uses visual markers to associate digital resources with physical artefacts. We present the iterative development of the tool through a user centred design process and demonstrate its use by domain experts to realise two distinct hybrid exhibits. The process of design and refinement of the tool highlights the need to adopt an experience oriented approach allowing authors to think in terms of the physical and digital "things" that comprise a hybrid experience rather than in terms of the underlying technical components.

Fairground: Thrill Laboratory was a series of live events that augmented the experience of amusement rides. A wearable telemetry system captured video, audio, heart-rate and acceleration data, streaming them live to spectator interfaces and a watching audience. In this paper, we present a study of this event, which draws on video recordings and post-event interviews, and which highlights the experiences of riders, spectators and ride operators. Our study shows how the telemetry system transformed riders into performers, spectators into an audience, and how the role of ride operator began to include aspects of orchestration, with the relationship between all three roles also transformed. Critically, the introduction of a telemetry system seems to have had the potential to re-connect riders/performers back to operators/orchestrators and spectators/audience, re-introducing a closer relationship that used to be available with smaller rides. Introducing telemetry to a real-world situation also creates significant complexity, which we illustrate by focussing on a moment of perceived crisis.

Mixed Reality Architecture (MRA) supports distributed teams in their everyday work activities by linking multiple physical spaces across a shared three-dimensional virtual world. User configurable audio-visual connections give the inhabitants of MRA full control over whom they want to be in contact with and when they make themselves available, as well as over the overall configuration. We report on the design of MRA, its deployment in an office environment and results from a long-term observational study. The study shows that MRA supports the management of awareness, social interaction and privacy well, that the architectural design features are crucial for this process and that the dynamic architectural topology of MRA and social interaction within it are linked in a fundamental way.

Movements of interfaces can be analyzed in terms of whether they are expected, sensed, and desired. Expected movements are those that users naturally perform; sensed are those that can be measured by a computer; and desired movements are those that are required by a given application. We show how a systematic comparison of expected, sensed, and desired movements, especially with regard to how they do not precisely overlap, can reveal potential problems with an interface and also inspire new features. We describe how this approach has been applied to the design of three interfaces: pointing flashlights at walls and posters in order to play sounds; the Augurscope II, a mobile augmented reality interface for outdoors; and the Drift Table, an item of furniture that uses load sensing to control the display of aerial photographs. We propose that this approach can help to build a bridge between the analytic and inspirational approaches to design and can help designers meet the challenges raised by a diversification of sensing technologies and interface forms, increased mobility, and an emerging focus on technologies for everyday life.

The augurscope is a portable mixed reality interface for outdoors. A tripod-mounted display is wheeled to different locations and rotated and tilted to view a virtual environment that is aligned with the physical background. Video from an onboard camera is embedded into this virtual environment. Our design encompasses physical form, interaction and the combination of a GPS receiver, electronic compass, accelerometer and rotary encoder for tracking. An initial application involves the public exploring a medieval castle from the site of its modern replacement. Analysis of use reveals problems with lighting, movement and relating virtual and physical viewpoints, and shows how environmental factors and physical form affect interaction. We suggest that problems might be accommodated by carefully constructing virtual and physical content

A study of a professional touring mixed reality performance called Desert Rain yields insights into how performers orchestrate players' engagement in an interactive experience. Six players at a time journey through an extended physical and virtual set. Each sees a virtual world projected onto a screen made from a fine water spray. This acts as a traversable interface, supporting the illusion that performers physically pass between real and virtual worlds. Live and video-based observations of Desert Rain, coupled with interviews with players and the production team, have revealed how the performers create conditions for the willing suspension of disbelief, and how they monitor and intervene in the players experience without breaking their engagement. This involves carefully timed performances and “off-face” and “virtual” interventions. In turn, these are supported by the ability to monitor players' physical and virtual activity through asymmetric interfaces.

We describe a pilot study of the use of a mixed reality environment for distributed presentations involving virtual and physical audiences and speakers. Our aims were to establish mutual awareness between all participants; to present physical and virtual worlds as being spatially integrated; and to support moderate sized audiences. We used a mixed reality boundary to join a physical space to a collaborative virtual environment so that the two appeared to be adjacent but distinct components of a single space. Two presentations were staged to a mixed physical and virtual audience, one by a virtual speaker and one by a physical speaker. Each presentation was followed by a question and answer session. Qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews and video recordings revealed that some degree of mutual awareness was established between participants and that physical participants may have viewed the environment as being more spatially integrated than virtual participants. We propose that improving avatars and video textures in the virtual environment may further enhance the experience.

Traversable interfaces establish the illusion that virtual and physical worlds are joined together and that users can physically cross from one to the other. Our design for a traversable interface combines work on tele-embodiment, mixed reality boundaries and virtual environments. It also exploits non-solid projection surfaces, of which we describe four examples. Our design accommodates the perspectives of users who traverse the interface and also observers who are present in the connected physical and virtual worlds, an important consideration for performance and entertainment applications. A demonstrator supports encounters between members of our laboratory and remote visitors.