Auditory headsets capable of actively or passively intermixing both real and virtual sounds are in-part acoustically transparent. This paper explores the consequences of acoustic transparency, both on the perception of virtual audio content, given the presence of a real-world auditory backdrop, and more broadly in facilitating a wearable, personal, private, always-available soundspace. We experimentally compare passive acoustically transparent, and active noise cancelling, orientation-tracked auditory headsets across a range of content types, both indoors and outdoors for validity. Our results show differences in terms of presence, realness and externalization for select content types. Via interviews and a survey, we discuss attitudes toward acoustic transparency (e.g. being perceived as safer), the potential shifts in audio usage that might be precipitated by adoption, and reflect on how such headsets and experiences fit within the area of Mixed Reality.

While personal devices are often used to connect online with others far away, public media rarely offers opportunities to connect with collocated individuals. We explore novel interaction strategies to enhance opportunistic collocated sociality through technologically augmented daily objects. ThinkCushion is an augmented cushion allowing users to record and playback audio messages either explicitly or implicitly by leaning on it. We deployed ThinkCushion in an open coworking space and gathered quantitative and qualitative data over one month to unveil how individuals discovered it and interacted. We individuate three modes of discovery (serendipitous, spectated and facilitated) and their relations with situated socio-spatial aspects. We discuss the interplay of active and passive interaction modalities for locally accessing and creating content, and how verbal content can be used in either performative or informative ways. We suggest future research on how to design public technologies supporting collocated sociality already from the phase of technological discovery.

Various mobile technologies proofed to enhance peoples collocated social interactions. In particular, user-generated presentations of self have proven beneficial, albeit in specific social settings. This field study interviewed 30 participants for their attitudes towards personal sharing in six public settings in a Nordic metropolitan area. We asked participants to draw what they want to share on an attachable paper sticker. We observed retention towards sharing in places with a more heterogeneous audience. Predominantly people’s attitudes towards sharing depended on an individual’s current context. Our results highlight the symbolic act of sharing in public as a factor for placing personal public displays. Further, we suggest leveraging the different strategies of extroverts and introverts for collocated social interactions.

Stroke is one of the most common cause of long-term disability in the world, significantly reducing quality of life through impairing motor functions and cognitive abilities. Whilst rehabilitation exercises can help in the recovery of motor function impairments, stroke survivors rarely exercise enough, leading to far from optimal recovery. In this paper, we investigate how upper limb stroke rehabilitation can be supported using interactive tangible bimanual devices in the home. We customise the rehabilitation activities based on individual rehabilitation requirements and motivation of stroke survivors. Through evaluation with five stroke survivors, we uncovered insight into how tangible stroke rehabilitation systems for the home should be designed. The evaluation revealed the special importance of tailorable form factor and supporting self-awareness and grip exercises in order to increase the independency of stroke survivors to carry out activities of daily living.

Recording experiences and memories is an important role for digital photography, with smartphone cameras leading to individuals taking increasing numbers of pictures of everyday experiences. Increasingly, these are automatically stored in personal, cloud-backed, photo repositories. However, such experiences can be forgotten quickly, with images 'lost' within the user's library, loosing their role in supporting reminiscing. We investigate how users might be provoked to view these images and the benefits they bring through the development and evaluation of a proactive, location-based reminiscing tool, called Reveal. We outline how a location-based approach allowed participants to reflect more widely on their photo practice, and the potential of such reminiscing tools to support effective management and curation of individual's increasingly large personal photo collections.

As location-based digital cultural heritage applications are beginning to be applied outside ‘traditional’ cultural heritage sites, there is an increased need to consider their use amongst people who may be interested in the cultural heritage of a site, but have that interest as a tangential, opportunistic, aspect of their visit. We outline why this is important, and present issues in evaluating it. We then introduce Explore: a mobile, location-based, digital cultural heritage application for the Finnish recreational island of Seurasaari. By considering how the common visitor trajectory of a museum visit can be mapped onto a visit to the island, we were able to evaluate Explore with participants who were not primarily there to access cultural heritage. Evaluation with 45 participants over 5 days identified how the low immersion techniques used allowed participants to fit accessing cultural heritage around their visit, how participants managed group tension between those more and those less interested in Explore, as well as issues around considering the use of cultural heritage applications as a tangential purpose of a visit.

Technologies that augment face-to-face interactions with a digital sense of self have been used to support conversations. That work has employed one homogenous technology, either 'off-the-shelf' or with a bespoke prototype, across all participants. Beyond speculative instances, it is unclear what technology individuals themselves would choose, if any, to augment their social interactions; what influence it may exert; or how use of heterogeneous devices may affect the value of this augmentation. This is important, as the devices that we use directly affect our behaviour, influencing affordances and how we engage in social interactions. Through a study of 28 participants, we compared head-mounted display, smartphones, and smartwatches to support digital augmentation of self during face-to-face interactions within a group. We identified a preference among participants for head-mounted displays to support privacy, while smartwatches and smartphones better supported conversational events (such as grounding and repair), along with group use through screen-sharing. Accordingly, we present software and hardware design recommendations and user interface guidelines for integrating a digital form of self into face-to-face conversations.

Walking trajectories have been used to understand how users interact with public displays. However, it has not yet been studied how displaying them in-situ could affect users' awareness about others' presence and activities. We present the study of an interactive public floor-projection called Traces. Traces projects the walking trajectories of individuals as they pass through the lobby of a university building. We investigated Traces through a 6 week in-field study. Our results outline how different uses and understandings of Traces contributed towards its appropriation as a glanceable display for social awareness. We outline design suggestions that future designers should consider to support social awareness with public displays.

Stroke is a significant cause of long-term disability, impairing over 10 million peoples motor function, primarily on one side of the body every year. Whilst effective rehabilitation exercises can help recover and maintain some affected motor function, stroke survivors often do not carry out enough of these. Instead relying on their 'good'; side to carry out tasks. However, this leads to poor recovery limiting the ability to carry out everyday bimanual tasks (such as dressing or cooking). We present work that seeks to support stroke survivors to engage in bimanual rehabilitation through interaction with augmented tangible objects that can be used to control everyday devices. Through a user-centered design process, we uncovered how bimanual rehabilitation can be supported. This led to the development of the ActivSticks device that allows bimanual rehabilitation and interaction with other devices and services.

We present results of an investigation into the role of seasonality in mobile cultural heritage applications. 45 participants in 26 groups used one of two applications when visiting the Finnish recreational island of Seurasaari. Each provided summer and winter content, but varied in how this was presented. We uncovered how users consider seasonality in content, seasonal preferences, as well as how different media becomes more or less interesting if shown in or out of season. We present design considerations for future researchers to consider seasonality in cultural heritage applications.

This paper presents four different tangible interactive prototypes designed to support the continuation of balance rehabilitation at home. The interactive prototypes are designed to provide a more enjoyable and experience when performing balance rehabilitation exercises. Early results from preliminary tests with stroke survivors and rehabilitation professionals are promising. The aim of the designs is to allow people at different levels of rehabilitation to engage into balance training and perform the exercises according to their current skills.

In this paper we outline the initial stages of a human centered design process aimed at the design of novel technology (tangible interactive objects) for stroke survivors. We found it useful to support standard methods, such as interviews and focus groups, with a video prototype in order to make the concept of tangible interaction, which was novel to our users, more clear. In addition we carried out a co-design workshop together with stroke survivors. Based on these activities, we present a set of preliminary design guidelines for tangible interaction for stroke survivors.

We present the results of an investigation into the role of curated representations of self, which we term Digital Selfs, in augmented multi-party face-to-face interactions. Advancements in wearable technologies (such as Head-Mounted Displays) have renewed interest in augmenting face-to-face interaction with digital content. However, existing work focuses on algorithmic matching between users, based on data-mining shared interests from individuals’ social media accounts, which can cause information that might be inappropriate or irrelevant to be disclosed to others. An alternative approach is to allow users to manually curate the digital augmentation they wish to present to others, allowing users to present those aspects of self that are most important to them and avoid undesired disclosure. Through interviews, video analysis, questionnaires and device logging, of 23 participants in 6 multi-party gatherings where individuals were allowed to freely mix, we identified how users created Digital Selfs from media largely outside existing social media accounts, and how Digital Selfs presented through HMDs were employed in multi-party interactions, playing key roles in facilitating strangers to interact with each other. We present guidance for the design of future multi-party digital augmentations in collaborative scenarios.

There is a lack of widely available mobile map applications that effectively support pedestrian tourists who prefer the freedom of exploring their surroundings, and might not have an explicit destination they are trying to reach in mind. Although research systems to support such exploratory navigation have been developed, these are often only studied in controlled trials. It is therefore unclear if researchers are covering all types of navigation tourists do. To get a comprehensive picture of tourists' navigation, we carried out a field study with 16 tourists, shadowing them during part of their visit to Helsinki. Our findings support designers of mobile applications by describing the phases and dynamics of exploration and wayfinding, as well as how existing popular navigation tools are used during exploration. The phases contribute towards a framework for assessing existing tools and developing new ones to cover all navigation activities tourists undertake. We present 5 design implications to support creating tools that take into account the real-world insights collected in the study.

A recent trend in HCI has been to employ wearable technology (such as Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs)) to help provoke and support face-to-face interaction through the presentation of, usually algorithmically matched, media from user social and digital media accounts. Such approaches could effectively support face-to-face interaction in many situations. However, work fails to consider the existing rich practices in how users manage their identity both face-to-face, and with existing social and digital media services. We present the results of 7 in-depth interviews on how users would wish to employ, manage and present social media in face-to-face encounters over a range of contexts and social relationships. We identified the importance of user control in selecting media, particularly when presenting to strangers, and how users would wish to present media to others. Our work provides guidance on how to more effectively employ existing media in face-to-face interaction.

In this paper we present the design and evaluation of Wandertroper, a mobile system designed to support reengagement with everyday surroundings during daily walks. Wandertroper generates real-time sound based on the spectromorphology of the inhabited soundscape, which is manipulated by how the user walks. Through an iterative participatory design process using semi-structured group discussions and 'in-the-wild' evaluations, we outline how design aspects, such as the degree of output abstraction and aesthetic personalisation of use, facilitated users' engagement with everyday surroundings. We discuss how Wandertroper turned daily walks into personally-meaningful aesthetic experiences.

Navigation when running is exploratory, characterised by both starting and ending in the same location, and iteratively foraging the environment to find areas with the most suitable running conditions. Runners do not wish to be explicitly directed, or refer to navigation aids that cause them to stop running, such as maps. Such undirected navigation is also common in other 'on-foot' scenarios, but how to support it is under-investigated. We contribute a novel method that uses crowd-sourced venue databases to rate a geographical area on its suitability to run in using linear regression. Our regression model is able to accurately predict the suitability of an area to run in (Pearson r=0.74) with a low mean error (RMSE=1.0). We outline how our method can support runners, and can be applied to other undirected navigation scenarios.

Increasing amounts of geo-tagged social media have led to interest in how that media can be re-integrated into the physical environment. Yet, although location information is often automatically appended to media, little is know about how users consider location in its creation and viewing. Using Graffiti as a design meme, we developed a novel social media service to investigate these issues. A two week field study showed how users incorporated both utilitarian and playful aspects of location into their social media creation, as well as revealing a disconnect between the location-media relationship intended by creators and perceived by viewers. We outline implications of our work for services that seek to repurpose existing geo-tagged social media in the design of novel services.

We present PULSE, a mobile application designed to allow users to gain a 'vibe', an intrinsic understanding of the people, places and activities around their current location, derived from messages on the Twitter social networking site. We compared two auditory presentations of the vibe. One presented message metadata implicitly through modification of spoken message attributes. The other presented the same metadata, but through additional auditory cues. We compared both techniques in a lab and real world study. Additional auditory cues were found to allow for smaller changes in metadata to be more accurately detected, but were least preferred when PULSE was used in context. Results also showed that PULSE enhanced and shaped user understanding, with audio presentation allowing a closer coupling of digital data to the physical world.

We present a tangible user interface (TUI) called Tangible Graph Builder, that has been designed to allow visually impaired users to access graph and chart-based data. We describe the current paper-based materials used to allow independent graph construction and browsing, before discussing how researchers have applied virtual haptic and non-speech audio techniques to provide more flexible access. We discuss why, although these technologies overcome many of the problems of non-visual graph access, they also introduce new issues and why the application of TUIs is important. An evaluation of Tangible Graph Builder with 12 participants (8 sight deprived, 4 blind) revealed key design requirements for non-visual TUIs, including phicon design and handling marker detection failure. We finish by presenting future work and improvements to our system.

We outline two new auditory interaction techniques which build upon existing visual techniques to display off-screen points of interest (POI) in map based mobile computing applications. SonicPie uses a pie menu and compass metaphor, allowing a user to scroll around the environment, hearing off-screen POIs in a spatialised auditory environment. EdgeTouch integrates with the Wedge technique of Gustafson et al. [2], sonifying the POIs as the user comes into contact with them when moving his or her finger around a "sonification border".

We present a study into the use of smell for searching digi-tal photo collections. Many people now have large photo libraries on their computers and effective search tools are needed. Smell has a strong link to memory and emotion so may be a good way to cue recall when searching. Our study compared text and smell based tagging. For the first stage we generated a set of smell and tag names from user de-scriptions of photos, participants then used these to tag pho-tos, returning two weeks later to answer questions on their photos. Results showed that participants could tag effec-tively with text labels, as this is a common and familiar task. Performance with smells was lower but participants performed significantly above chance, with some partici-pants using smells well. This suggests that smell has poten-tial. Results also showed that some smells were consistently identified and useful, but some were not and highlighted issues with smell delivery devices. We also discuss some practical issues of using smell for interaction.

Two investigations into the identification of concurrently presented, structured sounds, called earcons were carried out. One of the experiments investigated how varying the number of concurrently presented earcons affected their identification. It was found that varying the number had a significant effect on the proportion of earcons identified. Reducing the number of concurrently presented earcons lead to a general increase in the proportion of presented earcons successfully identified. The second experiment investigated how modifying the earcons and their presentation, using techniques influenced by auditory scene analysis, affected earcon identification. It was found that both modifying the earcons such that each was presented with a unique timbre, and altering their presentation such that there was a 300 ms onset-to-onset time delay between each earcon were found to significantly increase identification. Guidelines were drawn from this work to assist future interface designers when incorporating concurrently presented earcons.