Realistic 3D virtual environments, such as existing city models, have the potential to be used in pervasive games as a passageway between physical and virtual. Smooth attention displacement and transitions between these two realities are largely unexplored in the context of pervasive gameplay. We conducted two field trials using a pervasive live action role playing game to study the effect moving between the virtual and the physical has on co-presence and memorability. Although differences in co-presence during gameplay were small, they highlight the subtleties in the social structuring of pervasive gameplay. Spatial similarity between the physical and virtual environments made the 3D virtual environments more memorable. We identify two important issues to consider in embedding virtual environments into pervasive games: structuring of social interactions and the spatial realism of the VEs.

In this paper we explore immersive street-level integration of social media content into collaborative virtual 3D city environments on two levels: i) public, where the virtual environment is populated with relevant social media content (e.g. Twitter and Facebook feeds of shops, non-governmetal organizations, the City organization); and ii) personal, where the virtual user, through his/her avatar, is able to access his/her personal social media feeds while immersed in the virtual city. We conducted a qualitative anticipated user experience study with 14 participants in four focus groups, who were asked to create designs of how they imagined social networking services could be integrated into virtual city environments. Further, participants were asked to comment on two visual concepts created by researchers. Results show that people appreciate the concept of having virtual cities populated with up-to-date content from social media services, but linking their own social media accounts is a more complex issue.

We present a mixed-methods study aimed at assessing artists' experiences of a digital art exhibition service, called StreetGallery, on a network of interactive displays situated in public urban locations. We ground our analysis using survey responses and in-depth interviews of artists who have exhibited their art in StreetGallery over the years. Findings from these studies indicate that the artists highly value StreetGallery's open and egalitarian access to art, and its contribution towards fusing novel digital technologies and art in public urban spaces. We conclude that platforms such as StreetGallery have the potential to challenge traditional paradigms of art gallery practices and public urban spaces as a stage for consumption and commerce.

We describe an interactive digital art application deployed at a university campus with the goal of investigating participants' initial experiences of bridging two realities through 3D artwork in a hybrid reality space. The underlying purpose of the installation is to bring liveliness and increased social interaction to both the virtual and the physical world. We used the HTC Vive and a 3D painting program (Google Tilt Brush) for the creation of the artwork. After creation, the artworks were transferred to an immersive virtual mirror world, in our case a version of our university campus, using an export tool. Results from an initial user study with 32 participants suggest that people found our system attractive, and there was only slight difference in how much they enjoyed seeing their work in the Tilt Brush view versus the virtual campus gallery view.

We present a study on the use of audio-based cues to help overcome the well-known issue of display blindness, i.e. to help people become aware of situated interactive public displays. We used three different types of auditory cues based on suggestions from literature, namely spoken message, auditory icon, and random melody, and also included a no-audio condition as control. The study ran for 8 days on a university campus using an in-the-wild design, during which both qualitative and quantitative data were gathered. Results show that audio in general is good at attracting attention to the displays, and spoken message in particular also helps people understand that the display in question is interactive.

We present the development and evaluation of a situated crowdsourcing mechanism that estimates queue length in real time. The system relies on public interactive kiosks to collect human estimations about their queue waiting time. The system has been designed as a standalone tool that can be retrospectively embedded in a variety of locations without interfacing with billing or customer systems. An initial study was conducted in order to determine whether people who just joined the queue would differ in their estimates from people who were at the front of the queue. We then present our system's evaluation in four different restaurants over 19 weekdays. Our analysis shows how our system is perceived by users, and we develop 2 ways to optimise the waiting time estimation: by correcting the estimations based on the position of the input mechanism, and by changing the sliding window considered inputs to provide better prediction. Our analysis shows that approximately 7% of restaurant customers provided estimations, but even so our system can provide predictions with up to 2 minute mean absolute error.

This paper presents an interactive Soapbox platform, which utilizes networked public displays to encourage local citizens to participate in civic engagement. Soapbox is comprised of three subsystems: Soapbox for speaker (SFS), Soapbox for audience (SFA) and Shoutbox. SFS allows people to deliver a speech to the public. SFA enables audience members to watch a speech and give feedback to it. Shoutbox is an input tool that runs on personal devices and is used to author comments and share them with the speaker and other members of the audience. The Soapbox system was evaluated in both the lab and the field. The evaluation demonstrated that users are positive about trying the platform, and can quickly grasp how to use it. Further, participants thought that Soapbox is very appropriate for its purpose, and can effectively attract more citizens to participate in civic engagement.

The interaction process with interactive public displays can be viewed as a set of interaction phases. In this paper we report a wizard-of-Oz study that explores the last two phases: 1) subtle interaction, where users can interact with the display through gestures or movement, and 2) direct interaction, when users interact with the display by directly manipulating it through e.g. a touch-screen interface. We investigate the effect of these two interaction phases on at-glance information acquisition, and demonstrate that the presentation of such at-glance information items can help shorten interaction times during the direct interaction phase.

We propose a novel way to approach the research and design of urban ICT, namely, climate sensitive urban computing. This approach considers the climatic patterns, weather conditions and people's adaptations to them on the level of everyday practices. Our theoretical and methodological foundations lay in the fields of cultural anthropology, architecture, and HCI. First, we present a multidisciplinary discussion of prior works relating to technology, weather and climate conditions. Secondly, through two empirical, mostly qualitative data sets, we demonstrate the vast impact weather and climate have on young adults' ICT use at our research site located in Northern Finland. Thirdly, based on the theoretical discussion and findings from the real-world studies, we argue that climate sensitive thinking should be part of the design of urban ICT, and outline some central design challenges.

Most studies take for granted the critical first steps that prelude interaction with a public display: awareness of the interactive affordances of the display, and enticement to interact. In this paper we investigate mechanisms for enticing interaction on public displays, and study the effectiveness of visual signals in overcoming the 'first click' problem. We combined 3 atomic visual elements (color/greyscale, animation/static, and icon/text) to form 8 visual signals that were deployed on 8 interactive public displays on a university campus for 8 days. Our findings show that text is more effective in enticing interaction than icons, color more than greyscale, and static signals are more effective than animated. Further, we identify gender differences in the effectiveness of these signals. Finally, we identify a behavior termed "display avoidance" that people exhibit with interactive public displays.

This study is the first attempt to investigate altruistic use of interactive public displays in natural usage settings as a crowdsourcing mechanism. We test a non-paid crowdsourcing service on public displays with eight different motivation settings and analyse users' behavioural patterns and crowdsourcing performance (e.g., accuracy, time spent, tasks completed). The results show that altruistic use, such as for crowdsourcing, is feasible on public displays, and through the controlled use of motivational design and validation check mechanisms, performance can be improved. The results shed insights on three research challenges in the field: i) how does crowdsourcing performance on public displays compare to that of online crowdsourcing, ii) how to improve the quality of feedback collected from public displays which tends to be noisy, and iii) identify users' behavioural patterns towards crowdsourcing on public displays in natural usage settings.

We report a novel deployment of so-called UBI-hotspots in a city center to establish an ecosystem infrastructure for conducting diverse urban computing research and business in authentic urban setting. We focus on the value network of the hotspots where the commercial use of the hotspots generates revenue for covering their operational expenses. The value network has been validated by a 12-month long operation, during which the hotspots and their services have been available to the general public on 24/7 basis.

In this paper, we suggest utilizing modern social networking services for building versatile applications for interactive public displays. We demonstrate the functionality and potential of this approach by presenting a set of services deployed on top of a network of public displays, utilized in a longitudinal study in an authentic city setting. We further propose utilizing users' personal online profiles for building personalized and appealing public social services, and suggest that this may enhance the attractiveness of interactive public displays. Results of this study indicate that using interactive public displays is inherently a social event, and that services supporting group use and sociality succeed in urban smart spaces.

In this paper we present a web-based framework for spatiotemporal screen real estate management of interactive public displays. The framework facilitates dynamic partitioning of the screen real estate into virtual screens assigned for multiple concurrent web applications. The framework is utilized in the implementation of so-called UBI-hotspot, which provides various information services via different interaction modalities including mobile. The framework facilitates seamless integration of third party web applications residing anywhere in the public Internet into the UBI-hotspot, thus catering for a scalable and open architecture. We report the deployment of a network of indoor and outdoor UBI-hotspots at downtown Oulu, Finland. The quantitative data on the usage of the UBI-hotspots implicitly speaks in favor of the practical applicability of the framework.

In this paper we suggest a conceptual architecture for music systems, designed to shift the control over a shared urban space to the users themselves, and also to encourage social interaction between co-located friends and strangers alike. We present UbiRockMachine, a prototype application designed to bring the communities of local, un-signed music producers and music consumers together. The application provides a two-way communications channel where the music producers make their creative content available to the people occupying a shared social space. These people democratically choose the music played in the shared public space and provide valuable feedback to the musicians by downloading and rating their content.

We introduce BlueInfo, an open architecture for deploying Web services in WPAN hotspots for cost-free context-aware mobile access over Bluetooth. A BlueInfo hotspot either pushes subscribed services at desired intervals to registered devices (BlueInfo Push) or alternatively the user invokes a particular service by sending a simple keyword query to the hotspot (BlueInfo Pull). The BlueInfo hotspot requests the service from the origin server in the Internet and relays the response to the mobile device, possibly after adaptation for mobile viewing. The usability of BlueInfo Pull in comparison to a mobile phone browser is demonstrated with an empirical user evaluation conducted in a laboratory setting.

In this paper we suggest a conceptual architecture for music systems, designed to shift the control over a shared urban space to the users themselves, and also to encourage social interaction between co-located friends and strangers alike. We present UbiRockMachine, a prototype application designed to bring the communities of local, un-signed music producers and music consumers together. The application provides a two-way communications channel where the music producers make their creative content available to people occupying a shared social space. These people then democratically choose the music played in the shared public space and provide valuable feedback to the musicians by downloading and rating their content. We present findings from empirical user testing carried out in three separate locations, and outline directions for future work and further experiments.

The breakthrough of web 2.0 and sudden uprising of hundreds of different social networking sites have modified the way we communicate and share our experiences and lives with other people. Despite the undeniable networking advantages this digital world offers, it cannot be seen as purely positive development. Due to a prospering online "hang around" culture, we have lost genuine rich human social experiences to some degree. This paper proposes how to utilize the digital identities and content people have created within these services to improve and encourage natural communication and lower the social barrier of natural interaction in public settings. We propose a system that combines the content in the virtual world with the presence in real world settings. SocS (Social Surroundings) brings out digital information and media content of users to the current physical space, thus attempting to make individuals more approachable by other participants. The requirements, design principles and design of the proposed application are presented. We also discuss the usage and current state of social networking sites as a motivator for new genre of intelligent services.

We introduce panOULU Luotsi, a multi-device location-based information mash-up provided for the users of a large municipal wireless network. XML content in various forms, such as RSS/ATOM feeds from several content providers are automatically merged into a database using a flexible XML aggregator. It allows mapping different heterogeneous information feeds into the database without any changes to the application source code. The location of the user is estimated by identifying the WiFi access point to which the user's wireless device is currently connected. The information relevant to the user's current location is imposed on a map for a location-based browsing view, which allows the user to learn about nearby services, sites and events of interest.