Today smells are used for communicating information about products as household cleaners and food. However, smells can be also applied to any kind of products. Several researches have focused on integrating smells in virtual environments. The research questions addressed in this work concern whether Virtual Prototypes, including the sense of smell, can be used for evaluating products as effectively as studies performed in real environments, and whether smells can increase the users' sense of presence in the virtual environment. For this purpose, an experimental framework including a wearable olfactory display has been developed, and experimental tests have been performed.

The study of new systems for supporting upper limb rehabilitation is of primary importance, due to the high number of people in need of rehabilitation and the limited effectiveness of most of the current systems. The research work described in this paper proposes a VR system for upper-limb rehabilitation that is immersive, is based on hand gestures to interact with virtual objects, and which can deliver odours when a goal is reached.

Haptic perception constitutes an important component of our everyday interaction with many products. At the same time, several studies have, in recent years, demonstrated the importance of involving the emotions in the user-product interaction process. The present study was designed to investigate whether haptic interactions can affect, or modulate, people's responses to standardized emotional stimuli. 36 participants completed a self-assessment test concerning their emotional state utilizing as a pointer either a PHANToM device simulating a viscous force field while they moved the stylus, or else a stylus with no force field. During the presentation of the emotional pictures, various physiological parameters were recorded from participants. The results revealed a significant difference in the self-reported arousal associated with the pictures but no significant difference in the physiological measures. The behavioural findings are interpreted in terms of an effect of the haptic feedback on participants' perceived/interpreted emotional arousal. These results suggest that haptic feedback could, in the future, be used to modify participants' interpretation of their physiological states.

The preliminary study described in this paper is about the assessment of the control parameters of a non-grounded haptic device giving kinaesthetic stimuli to indicate to the user a direction to follow to reach a target location. The haptic sensation is created by tilting one or more rotating flywheels along an axis, controlling the direction and the amount of tilt, the velocity of the tilt (during the pulse and the repositioning of the flywheel), the frequency of pulses. The current prototype has only one flywheel and is able to tilt along a single axis, thus indicating only “right” or “left” direction. The experiments performed with the prototype allowed us to define a set of requirements (torque produced, duration of the stimuli) for a more complex prototype (2 flywheels and 2 DOF) to be developed and tested as future work.

The paper describes the use of interactive Virtual Prototypes (iVP) for the specification of consumer products and for the evaluation of the perceived quality of the product already in its conceptual form. iVPs are based on multimodal interaction including force-feedback and sound in addition to 3D stereoscopic visualization. The fidelity of the prototypes has been evaluated in comparison with the corresponding real products, when used for performing the same tests. Differently from the traditional use of Virtual Prototypes, which aims at evaluating the product design, we have used iVPs for the interaction design of a new product, i.e. it has been used as a means to define the design parameters used for the specification of a new product.

This paper describes a framework based on a publish/subscribe paradigm for interprocess communication based on XML messages sent over a TCP/IP connection. The framework manages the exchange of data within the clients of a system and permits the definition of a specific behavior for each client using a finite-state machine approach. Whilst the server-side of the framework is able to receive and dispatch events and data, the client-side of the framework is modeled as a finite-state machine able to perform state transitions after receiving the correct message. This architecture permits the loose-coupling between producers and consumers of data and the bidirectional mapping between the design of the behavior of a system and its implementation.

Gestures, besides speech, represent the mostly used means of expression by humans. For what regards the product design field, designers have multiple ways for communicating their ideas and concepts. One of them concerns the model making activity, where designers make explicit their concepts by using some appropriate tools and specific hand movements on plastic material with the intent of obtaining a shape. Some studies have demonstrated that visual, tactile and kinesthetic feedbacks are equally important in the shape creation and evaluation process [1]. The European project Touch and Design (T'nD) (www.kaemart.it/touch-and-design) proposes the implementation of an innovative virtual clay modeling system based on novel haptic interaction modality oriented to industrial designers. In order to develop an intuitive and easy-to-use system, a study of designers' hand modeling activities has been carried out by the project industrial partners supported by cognitive psychologists. The users' manual operators and tools have been translated into corresponding haptic tools and multimodal interaction modalities in the virtual free-form shape modeling system. The paper presents the project research activities and the results achieved so far.

Haptic interfaces represent a revolution in human computer interface technology since they make it possible for users to touch and manipulate virtual objects. In this work we describe a cross‐model interaction experiment to study the effect of adding haptic cues to visual cues when vision is not enough to disambiguate the images. We relate the results to those obtained in experimental psychology as well as to more recent studies on the subject.

Multiple input devices are increasingly used in user interfaces to make human-computer communication more efficient and effective. Interface designers have not only to decide on which input modes should be supported, but also how to fuse them into a single representation format that can be processed by the underlying application system. Drawing appropriate decisions requires, however, a sufficient understanding of the properties of fusion itself. While others have informally characterized input fusion as a transformation between information types, the purpose of the paper is to explore fusion by means of formal process modelling. That is, fusion processes are defined in a formal framework which supports proof of the existence of necessary properties following directly from the process definitions. The presented approach can be applied to analyse and compare fusion processes in existing systems, as well as an aid for interface designers, who have to verify the behaviour of their systems.

User interfaces of current 3D and virtual reality environments require highly interactive input/output (I/O) techniques and appropriate input devices, providing users with natural and intuitive ways of interacting. This paper presents an interaction model, some techniques, and some ways of using novel input devices for 3D user interfaces. The interaction model is based on a tool‐object syntax, where the interaction structure syntactically simulates an action sequence typical of a human's everyday life: One picks up a tool and then uses it on an object. Instead of using a conventional mouse, actions are input through two novel input devices, a hand‐ and a force‐input device. The devices can be used simultaneously or in sequence, and the information they convey can be processed in a combined or in an independent way by the system. The use of a hand‐input device allows the recognition of static poses and dynamic gestures performed by a user's hand. Hand gestures are used for selecting, or acting as, tools and for manipulating graphical objects. A system for teaching and recognizing dynamic gestures, and for providing graphical feedback for them, is described.

Abstract In user interfaces of modern systems, users get the impression of directly interacting with application objects. In 3D based user interfaces, novel input devices, like hand and force input devices, are being introduced. They aim at providing natural ways of interaction. The use of a hand input device allows the recognition of static poses and dynamic gestures performed by a user's hand. This paper describes the use of a hand input device for interacting with a 3D graphical application. A dynamic gesture language, which allows users to teach some hand gestures, is presented. Furthermore, a user interface integrating the recognition of these gestures and providing feedback for them, is introduced. Particular attention has been spent on implementing a tool for easy specification of dynamic gestures, and on strategies for providing graphical feedback to users' interactions. To demonstrate that the introduced 3D user interface features, and the way the system presents graphical feedback, are not restricted to a hand input device, a force input device has also been integrated into the user interface.