Die industrielle Instandhaltung ist ein erheblicher Kostenfaktor während der Betriebsphase einer verfahrenstechnischen Produktionsanlage. Insbesondere der Mangel an technischen Möglichkeiten zum Informationsaustausch des Instandhaltungspersonals mit der digitalen Anlage während der Arbeiten im Feld erzeugt hohe Kosten. Durch die entstehenden Medienbrüche sinkt die Qualität der Informationen in der Digitalen Anlage erheblich. Mobile Informationssysteme können diese Medienbrüche beseitigen und die Informationsqualität in der Digitalen Anlage entscheidend verbessern. Das Konzept der Distributed Wearable User Interfaces (DWUI) stellt einen integrierten Ansatz zur flexiblen Zusammenstellung gebrauchstauglicher Benutzungsschnittstellen für komplexe Arbeitsabläufe in widrigen Arbeitssituationen bereit. Diese setzen sich aus Interaktionsgeräten zusammen, die in einem kabellosen körpernahen Funknetzwerk miteinander verbunden sind und in ihrer Kombination die Benutzungsschnittstelle zu einem mobilen System bilden. Die Geräte sind ergonomisch und funktional optimal am Körper des Nutzers verteilt, wobei jedes Gerät eigenständig nutzbar und für eine bestimmte Aufgabe oder einen bestimmten Nutzungskontext optimiert ist. Die Ein- und Ausgaberäume der Geräte werden in einem integrierten Interaktionsraum harmonisiert. Im Rahmen dieser Arbeit wird zunächst der Nutzungskontext der mobilen IT-gestützten Instandhaltung verfahrenstechnischer Produktionsanlagen im Hinblick auf Nutzungsszenarien und Anwendungsfälle für mobile Informationssysteme festgelegt. Darauf aufbauend werden Anforderungen an derartige Systeme spezifiziert und Gestaltungsgrundlagen und Empfehlungen speziell für DWUI-basierte mobile Informationssysteme erarbeitet. Anschließend wird eine Reihe spezieller Interaktionsgeräte vorgestellt, die verschiedene Interaktionsprinzipien, Techniken und Modalitäten umsetzen. Um diese Geräte in einem kollaborativen DWUI organisieren zu können, wird ein spezielles Kommunikationsprotokoll entworfen und prototypisch umgesetzt. Eine mobile Anwendung zur Instandhaltungsunterstützung wird vorgestellt, welche das DWUI-Kommunikationsprotokoll unterstützt und mit verschiedenen DWUI-Konfigurationen vollständig bedienbar ist. Diese Anwendung wird integriert in ein komplexes Unternehmensnetzwerk, über das sie Zugriff auf industrietypische computergestützte Planungswerkzeuge erhält. Anhand des resultierenden Gesamtsystems werden die prinzipielle Tauglichkeit und die Vorteile des DWUI-Konzepts demonstriert.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 26-29, 1998 / Town & Country Resort Hotel and Convention Center, San Diego, California / The necessity to acquire and analyze data dates back to the beginning of science itself. Long ago, a scientist may have run experiments and noted the results on a piece of paper. These notes became the data. The method was crude, but effective. As experiments got more complex, the need for better methodologies arose. Scientists began using computers to gather, analyze, and store the data. This method worked well for most types of data acquisition. As the amount of data being collected increased, larger computers, faster processors, and faster storage devices were used in order to keep up with the demand. This method was more refined, but still did not meet the needs of the scientific community. Requirements began to change in the data acquisition arena. More people wanted access to the data in real time. Companies producing large data acquisition systems began to move toward a network-based solution. This architecture featured a specialized computer called the server, which contained all of the data acquisition hardware. The server handled requests from multiple clients and handled the data flow to the network, data displays, and the archive medium. While this solution worked well to satisfy most requirements, it fell short in meeting others. The ability to have multiple computers working together across a local or wide area network (LAN or WAN) was not addressed. In addition, this architecture inherently had a single point of failure. If the server machine went down, all data from all sources was lost. Today, we see that the requirements for data acquisition systems include features only dreamed of five years ago. These new systems are linked around the world by wide area networks. They may include code to command satellites or handle 250 Mbps download rates. They must produce data for dozens of users at once, be customizable by the end user, and they must run on personal computers (PCs)! Systems like these cannot work using the traditional client/server model of the past. The data acquisition industry demands systems with far more features than were traditionally available. These systems must provide more reliability and interoperability, and be available at a fraction of the cost. To this end, we must use commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) computers that operate faster than the mainframe computers of only a decade ago. These computers must run software that is smart, reliable, scalable, and easy to use. All of these requirements can be met by a network of PCs running the Windows NT operating system.

本研究欲瞭解在資訊時代裡、超媒體的形式特性所中介出來的媒介經驗，即網站介面上的符號展演可能對使用者傳遞出怎樣的訊息？網站介面上的符號編排方式及超文本的結構內容會如何型塑出不同於其他媒介的使用經驗？由於隱喻運用於圖形使用者介面上已有二十多年歷史，且在傳播學門裡有著豐富的討論，因此本研究以介面上的隱喻運用作為探究超媒體經驗特性的問路石。 在回顧人機互動領域及傳播學門裡對隱喻的討論後，本研究以Fauconnier & Turner所提出的概念合成理論（conceptual blending theory）為理論工具，並選取數個網站介面的設計進行探究。透過個案分析發現，隱喻在網站介面的應用上，會透過介面媒材、超文本結構及互動功能設計綜合展現出來，而在作用層面上，介面隱喻為建構使用者瀏覽經驗的認知中介物，將真實世界概念與系統功能相互融合、構作出一組相對容易吸收與學習的經驗知識，在這之中並可能彰顯與網站定位相關的特定訊息。 本研究以為，概念合成理論能幫助我們解釋網際網路中的瀏覽經驗，是如何從媒介的物質基礎與人類的肢體與幻想中誘發出來。由介面隱喻所勾勒出的情境會激化了心智空間內豐富而複雜的互動過程，再加上電腦即時的互動性，使得使用者對該網站的概念結構與肢體動作皆會融合在一個整合的行動空間內。另外，在網站設計策略裡常見的場所隱喻及空間隱喻則是立基於「網站即空間」的概念隱喻裡，網路的空間性藉由隱喻語彙的描述、隱喻設計的增生而不斷地建構、累積、再建構，最後成為網路文化的一部份。

Stories, themes, concepts and references are organized structurally and purposefully in most books. A person reading a book needs to understand themes and concepts within the context. Schank’s Dynamic Memory theory suggested that building on existing memory structures is essential to cognition and learning. Pirolli and Card emphasized the need to provide people with an independent and improved ability to access and understand information in their information seeking activities. Through a review of users’ reading behaviours and of existing e-Book user interfaces, we found that current e-Book browsers provide minimal support for comprehending the content of large and complex books. Readers of an e-Book need user interfaces that present and relate the organizational and narrative structures, and moreover, reveal the thematic structures. This thesis addresses the problem of providing readers with effective scaffolding of multiple structures of an e-Book in the user interface to support reading for comprehension. Recognising a story or topic as the basic unit in a book, we developed novel story segmentation techniques for discovering narrative segments, and adapted story linking techniques for linking narrative threads in semi-structured linear texts of an e-Book. We then designed an e-Book user interface to present the complex structures of the e-Book, as well as to assist the reader to discover these structures. We designed and developed evaluation methodologies to investigate reading and comprehension in e-Books, in order to assess the effectiveness of this user interface. We designed semi-directed reading tasks using a Story-Theme Map, and a set of corresponding measurements for the answers. We conducted user evaluations with book readers. Participants were asked to read stories, to browse and link related stories, and to identify major themes of stories in an e-Book. This thesis reports the experimental design and results in detail. The results confirmed that the e-Book interface helped readers perform reading tasks more effectively. The most important and interesting finding is that the interface proved to be more helpful to novice readers who had little background knowledge of the book. In addition, each component that supported the user interface was evaluated separately in a laboratory setting and, these results too are reported in the thesis.

In this study, we will explore how a restricted user interface affects the player experience in survival horror games. To test this, we created a digital survival horror game. The restricted user interface in the prototype resides in the player controller who has access to five different user interface elements. These elements are health, revolver, flashlight, compass and a watch. The results showed that the restriction and making the user interface diegetic did affect the player experience. This was presented through dividing the participant's experiences with the prototype in four categories: Challenge, Analytical, Safety and Control. Participant’s enjoyed the added challenge from the restricted user interface which also helped promote the horror experience. As a drawback, a restricted user interface resulted in participants having a harder time learning the game and understanding certain game mechanics and elements. / I denna studie så kommer vi undersöka hur ett begränsat användargränssnitt påverkar spelupplevelsen i överlevnadsskräckspel. För att testa detta så skapade vi ett digitalt överlevnadsskräckspel. Det begränsade användargränssnittet i prototypen befinner sig på den spelbara karaktären som har tillgång till fem olika användargränssnitts element. Dessa element är hälsa, revolver, ficklampa, kompass och klocka. Resultaten visar att begränsningen och genom att göra användargränssnittet diegetisk påverkade spelupplevelsen. Detta var presenterat genom att dela upp deltagarens erfarenheter med prototypen i fyra olika kategorier: utmaning, analytisk, säkerhet och kontroll. Deltagare gillade ökningen i utmaning från det begränsade gränssnittet som även hjälpte stärkte skräckupplevelsen. En nackdel med ett begränsat gränssnitt var att deltagare hade det svårare att lära sig spelet samt förstå vissa spelmekaniker och spelement.

Year after year, technologies are evolving in an incredible rapid pace, becoming faster, more complex, more accurate and more immersive. Looking back just a decade, especially interaction technologies have made a major leap. Just two years ago in 2013, after being researched for quite some time, the hype around virtual reality (VR) arouse renewed enthusiasm, finally reaching mainstream attention as the so called head-mounted displays (HMD), devices worn on the head  to grant a visual peek into the virtual world, gain more and more acceptance with the end-user. Currently, humans interact with computers in a very counter-intuitive two dimensional way. The ability to experience digital content in the humans most natural manner, by simply looking around and perceiving information from their surroundings, has the potential to be a major game changer in how we perceive and eventually interact with digital information. However, this confronts designers and developers with new challenges of how to apply these exciting technologies, supporting interaction mechanisms to naturally explore digital information in the virtual world, ultimately overcoming real world boundaries. Within the virtual world, the only limit is our imagination. This thesis investigates an approach of how to naturally interact and explore information based on open data within an immersive virtual reality environment using a head-mounted display and vision-based motion controls. For this purpose, an immersive VR application visualizing information as a network of European capital cities has been implemented, offering interaction through gesture input. The application lays a major focus on the exploration of the generated network and the consumption of the displayed information. While the conducted user interaction study with eleven participants investigated their acceptance of the developed prototype, estimating their workload and examining their explorative behaviour, the additional dialog with five experts in the form of explorative discussions provided further feedback towards the prototype’s design and concept. The results indicate the participants’ enthusiasm and excitement towards the novelty and intuitiveness of exploring information in a less traditional way than before, while challenging them with the applied interface and interaction design in a positive manner. The design and concept were also accepted through the experts, valuing the idea and implementation. They provided constructive feedback towards the visualization of the information as well as emphasising and encouraging to be even bolder, making more usage of the available 3D environment. Finally, the thesis discusses these findings and proposes recommendations for future work.

Using Mehrabian and Russell’s (1974) stimulus (S) - organism (O) - response (R) model, this study developed online shopping experience framework that explains consumer behavioral responses toward online and offline stores. The results of the examined hypothesized relationships in this study reveal website attributes that create positive affective and attitudinal states and behavioral responses toward the retailers and retailers’ websites. Among website attributes, interface design is the strongest predictor of all behavioral responses, while website attributes relating to shopping services and security/privacy affect long term behavioral responses, such as purchase intention and brand loyalty. This study is imperative to practitioners and researchers, as they will help further develop online store environments and online shopping experience.

Title: Semantic annotation and querying RDF data Author: Jakub Kýpeť Department: Department of Software Engineering Supervisor: Prof. RNDr. Peter Vojtáš, DrSc. Abstract: The presented thesis in detail describes a design and an implementation of self-sustained server application, that allows us to create and manage semantic annotations for various web pages. In the first part it describes the manual annotations and the human interface we have build for them. In the second part it also describes our implementation for a web crawler and an automatic annotation system utilizing this crawler. The last part of the thesis analyzes the testing of this automated system that has been performed using several e- commerce websites with different domains. Keywords: semantic annotation, querying RDF data, user interface, web crawl- ing, automatization

Cette thèse traite des interfaces utilisateur tangibles (TUI). La première partie de ce manuscrit concerne l'interaction tangible sur table interactive. Nous introduisons tout d'abord les TUIs et les tables interactives. Nous validons une hypothèse concernant la spécialisation de la forme des interacteurs tangibles et nous en tirons les conséquences pour la conception des TUIs. Nous proposons une solution de boîtier à boutons pour y déporter certaines opérations dans le contexte d'une TUI sur table interactive. Nous abordons la construction et le développement d'un système de tables interactives tangibles transportables et à faible coût permettant de faire du prototypage rapide de TUIs. Nous terminons en soulignant les particularités de l'évaluation expérimentale des TUIs. La seconde partie de ce manuscrit traite un cas d'application d'une TUI pour les géosciences : GeoTUI. Nous commençons par présenter le contexte métier des géophysiciens et leurs besoins en terme de nouveaux moyens d'interaction. Nous présentons les résultats de notre conception d'une TUI pour les géosciences. Nous précisons le détail du développement de notre prototype. Pour terminer, nous présentons les deux expérimentations utilisateurs qui ont été conduites pour valider nos choix de conception. / This thesis focuses on tangible user interfaces (TUI). The first part of this manuscript is about tangible interaction on tabletop. We first introduce TUIs and tabletops. We validate an hypothesis about the specialization of the form of the tangible objects, and conclude from that consequences on TUIs design. We propose the solution of a button box to deport some operations in the context of tabletop TUI. We present the construction and development of a transportable and low cost tabletop TUI system that allows rapid TUI prototyping. We end pointing out the special features of user experiments of TUIs. The second part of this manuscript deals with an application case of a TUI for geoscience: GeoTUI. We start presenting the context of the geophysicists work and their need in term of new way of interation. We present the results of our design of a TUI for geoscience. We detail the development of our prototype. To finish, we present two user experiments we conducted to validate our design choices.

Depuis le début des années 1990, l'ordinateur a introduit de nouvelles réalités technologiques dans les pratiques architecturales. Le changement s'est opéré progressivement, aux travers de plusieurs expérimentations, qui ont entrainé l'appropriation de certains logiciels et environnements de programmation, et aussi l'élaboration de nouvelles machines de fabrication. De nombreux architectes ont d'ailleurs expérimenté ces nouvelles technologies dans l'objectif de trouver de nouveaux modes d'exploration de la forme. Ces explorations architecturales constituent un corpus d'étude riche et fécond pour rendre compte des différentes conduites et attitudes adoptées vis-à-vis des technologies numériques. En s'appuyant sur certains penseurs de la technique comme le philosophe Gilbert Simondon, cette recherche a défini des sensibilités singulières propres aux architectes, construites par étapes successives, et modifiant à chaque fois leurs approches du projet. Notre démarche transductive montre que ces sensibilités technologiques s'avèrent à la fois structurantes et structurées par les explorations architecturales. Cette évolution des sensibilités participe autant que les projets à la construction d'un imaginaire numérique, lequel est à l'origine d'inventions architecturales particulières. Ces inventions architecturales propres au numérique ne se sont pas réalisées directement, mais au travers d'une articulation technologique complexe, intégrant les différentes phases du projet-objet. L'analyse de cette chaîne de relation a permis de suivre les tensions entre les désirs architecturaux et les potentialités technologiques qui ont structuré la période étudiée. Cette énergie humaine, déployée et accumulée sur plus de vingt ans d'expérimentations et d'explorations, a finalement laissé des traces sur les différentes couches du bâtiment, révélant par là certains aboutissements du numérique en architecture / Since the beginning of 90s, computers introduced new technological realities in architectural practices. Changes occurred gradually, through several phases of experimentation, and performed by tools (software) or manufacturing machines of all kinds, revealing the different ways architects appropriate technologies. Many architects seized these technological opportunities to find new ways in exploring the form. These architectural explorations constitute a rich and fruitful corpus to understand the different behaviors and attitudes towards digital technologies. Based on philosophers of technique such as Gilbert Simondon, this research defines the sensibilities specific to architects constructed in successive steps and modifying their perceptions of the project. Our transductive approach shows that these technical sensibilities happen to be structured by the architectural explorations and at the same time to structure these explorations. This evolution of sensibility participates in the construction of the architect's digital thinking, which is at the origin of some particular architectural inventions. These architectural inventions specific to digital technologies are not achieved directly, but integrating different phases of the project-object through a complex technical articulation. The analysis of this chain relationship allows monitoring the tensions between architectural desires and technical potentials, which structure the studied period. The human efforts deployed and accumulated over twenty years of experimentation and exploration have finally left their mark on different layers of the building by revealing, thus, some particular achievements of digital technologies in architecture