In this thesis, we are interested in the use of tabletop surfaces for interactive manipulations. We focus on the implementation of Image Processing algorithms and techniques in two projects exploiting a horizontal surface: "Tangram Project" and "MirrorTrack". The "Tangram Project" studies children's mathematical skills when manipulating geometrical shapes. This project is supported by NFS (NSF 0736151) based on the proposal "Social Organization, Learning Technologies & Discourse: System Features for Facilitating Mathematical Reasoning in PreK-3 Students" by M. Evans, F. Quek, R. Ehrich and J. Wilkins. Our contribution is the design and realization of visio-based tracking software that could be used in a classroom. Our implementation offers three modes of interaction making it easier to study the children's behaviors in specific situations and constraints. The "MirrorTrack Project" is an idea described in previous research [P.-K. Chung et al,2008a] [P.-K. Chung et al,2008b] using a horizontal surface with two side-mounted cameras to track fingertips. Our contribution to the "MirrorTrack Project" is the design and realization of video-based interaction software. "MirrorTrack Project" provides an improvement to one of the Tangram modes (the Virtual mode) by providing real 3D fingertip location above the surface. Among other functionalities, it provides hovering and touch detection [Y. Verdie et al, 2009]. We conclude by describing the possibility of merging those two systems and by highlighting the benefits of such a fusion. Integrating "MirrorTrack" with the "Tangram project" provides even more interaction opportunities for the children. / Master of Science

Wearable computers allow users the freedom to work in any environment including hazardous environments that may require protective clothing. Past research has shown that protective clothing interferes with manual materials handling tasks, medical tasks, and manual dexterity tasks. However, little information exists regarding how protective clothing affects task performance with wearable input devices. As a result, a study was conducted to address this issue and offer recommendations to enhance the compatibility of chemical protective clothing and wearable input devices. Sixteen active-duty soldiers performed a text-entry task with a wearable mouse and touch pad, while bare handed, wearing 7-mil, 14-mil, and 25-mil chemical protective gloves, wearing a respirator alone, and wearing the respirator and each of three gloves. Upon completion of the experiment, participants rated task difficulty, confidence using the input device, and input device preference. Task completion times were 9% slower with the 25-mil glove than the 7-mil glove. Text entry was not perceived as difficult when bare handed, or wearing the 7-mil and 14-mil gloves, suggesting that thin chemical protective gloves (i.e. 7-mil and 14-mil) are more suitable than thicker gloves for use with wearable input devices. When using the touch pad, task completion times were 17% faster than when using the mouse. Subjective ratings of difficulty, confidence, and preference provide strong support for the use of a touch pad input device rather than a mouse. / Master of Science

Smartphone games are very popular and have the highest revenue of all smartphone application categories. Some even suggest that the the games can create an addiction. This addiction has however not been classified as a disorder and the components in the games that create an addiction have not been determined. This thesis had two goals. The first was to investigate and identify addictive components in smartphone games. The second goal was to use these components to develop an addictive proof of concept smartphone game prototype. The prototype was also to be evaluated regarding usability and how well it included the addictive components. The components in these games that create an addiction were identified using a literature study. After establishing a theoretical framework, eight different areas of addictive smartphone game components were found. These areas were further condensed into 16 guidelines of how to make a smartphone game addictive. The guidelines were used to create a prototype which later was evaluated with a supervised play test, a short interview, a usability questionnaire and a survey with questions regarding how well the guidelines were implemented. The usability of the game prototype was regarded as good and 13 of 14 implemented guidelines received positive results in the survey. In addition to this, all test users also regarded the game prototype as fun to play and wanted to play it again. Based on these results, the implemented smartphone game prototype was concluded to be addictive.

Designers and non-designers alike often describe fabric in ways that are markedly different or unclear. For example, two designers might attribute qualities such as ``heavy'' to a material, but actually mean completely different things, despite using the same words. This ambiguity in description becomes more prominent when the designer has to make sense of the fabric remotely, such as shopping online. This ambiguity in description presets an opportunity to study user interface design that supports, rather than diminishes, the role of ambiguity, which is often a resource in design domains. Our most important research question was: How can we design interfaces with standard interface toolkits to help designers explore and understand material remotely? For our approach, we studied how people described distinct fabrics, from experts, novices, to everyday people and the crowdsourcing community on how they interpret fabrics. We applied that information to designs that communicated materiality and ambiguity in various ways, and studied how interfaces affected a user's process of exploring materials and negotiating the meaning of materiality. The most important findings are user interface guidelines that apply to designing technology any domain focused on description and ambiguity, such as design domains. Such design guidelines include: (1) the importance to communicate distinctions between description and category, (2) The role of ambiguity in design, while well-supported in the literature, is a value not shared among all practitioners, and (3) a better understanding of the different ways users negotiate with description and make sense of material remotely. / Ph. D. / When presented with a fabric, even experienced designers tend to describe it in very different, often unclear, ways. For example, two designers describing the denim in a pair of jeans might refer to it as thick. However, they could be talking about completely different properties – one might be referring to the thread count of the fabric while another could be referring to the general feel. This ambiguity in description becomes more prominent when the designer cannot touch a fabric directly, such as when shopping online. This problem inspired us to better understand how people describe fabric, so that we could design user interfaces that focus on these kinds of ambiguous situations. We began by studying how people interpreted distinct fabrics. These people included experts, novices, and even crowdsourced people from around the world. We applied that information to designs that helped users get a sense of the fabric in various ways, such as showing videos of the fabric, and seeing a cluster of descriptions used to describe a fabric. Using this information, we designed several interfaces, for exploring fabrics remotely. We then studied how users explored and understood fabrics remotely through these interfaces. Among the most important findings was a set of user interface guidelines for domains that focus on ambiguity and description, such as design. Our first guideline is that designs must communicate the difference between qualities and categories. For example, one could label all cotton fabrics categorically as “cotton”. However, user confusion might arise when presenting a fabric that is a cotton/silk blend, or one that has silky qualities but is nonetheless made of cotton. Next, while much research shows that supports ambiguity can be a valuable resource, many practitioners instead see ambiguity as an obstacle. As such, it is important to take this into account when including ambiguous elements into user interfaces. For example, some users may just want to see “thick” descriptor, while others would prefer a series of precise measurements. This work is interdisciplinary, spanning fields and disciplines like computer science, costume design, and Human-Computer Interaction. This work's impact focuses on designing interfaces that support exploration of materials and description already used in the field.

The definition of technology may have changed quite a bit over the years, but people have been bringing technology to remote, natural locations since long before concepts like recreational hiking or national parks existed. Nowadays, "digital" is usually implied before the word technology, and discussion of technology and trails often revolves around smartphones and GPS systems. However, a wide variety of hiking gear has benefited from precise engineering and product design. Even with more digital products hitting the shelves, many hikers go out on the trail to get away from or limit their use of technology, however they may define that word. Before any technology for the trail can be designed, the diverse perspectives of hikers must be explored rather than taking them for granted. Polling hikers through digital means or even delivering prototypes for research through design seems disingenuous when part of the target audience has negative attitudes towards technology. For this reason, cultural probes stood out as a useful method for understanding hikers and inspiring future directions for Technology on the Trail. The heart of the matter is indeed a question of culture, so probes are a logical choice for teasing out a variety of viewpoints. The goal of this study is not to design new technology. Rather, the goal is to find a way to make technology and nature more harmonious in the context of hiking. This could end up requiring new designs, but it could also be a matter of shifting perspective instead. No device or gear will ever be for everyone, and that's natural. Technology on the Trail can still seek to support both users of technology and the bystanders who are affected by the technology use of others. / Master of Science / Technology is nothing new on the trail. People have been bringing various “technologies” to remote, natural locations long before recreational hiking or national parks existed. The definition of technology, however, has changed quite a bit over the years. Long ago, the stars were an important aspect of wayfinding, and devices to track star positions were innovative. Nowadays, people tend to see smartphones and GPS systems as technology. Hiking technology has been growing more advanced in recent years, including many digital technologies. However, many hikers go out on the trail to get away from or limit their use of technology. Hikers have a diverse range of perspectives on how technology should and shouldn’t fit into outdoor settings, and designers should listen to these perspectives before creating new technologies. This study aims to create a dialogue with hikers that explores their usage of and opinions on technology for hiking. Several activities were created that would allow participants to creatively engage with us researchers, such as a scrapbook activity and a scavenger hunt. These methods follow a style of research called “cultural probes” in which researchers use creative prompts and activities to explore the culture of a target audience. By listening to the diverse perspectives of hikers, this study hopes to find a way to make technology and nature more harmonious. No device or gear will ever be for everyone, and that’s natural. Technology on the Trail can still seek to support the people who do want to use technology, and it can seek to make those technologies minimally invasive for people who don’t.

Sensemaking is the way in which we understand the world around us. Pirolli and Card developed a sensemaking model related to intelligence analysis, which involves taking raw, unstructured data, analyzing it, and presenting a report of the findings. With lower-cost immersive technologies becoming more popular, new opportunities exist to leverage embodied and distributed cognition to better support sensemaking by providing vast, immersive space for creating meaningful schemas (organizational structures) during an analysis task. This work builds on prior work in immersive analytics on the concept of Immersive Space to Think (IST), which provides analysts with immersive space to physically navigate and use to organize information during a sensemaking task. In this work, we performed several studies that aimed to understand how IST supports sensemaking and how we can develop additional features to better aid analysts while they complete sensemaking in immersive analytics systems, focusing on non-quantitative data analysis. In a series of exploratory user studies, we aimed to understand how users' sensemaking process evolves during multiple session analyses, which identified how the participants refined their use of the immersive space into later stages of the sensemaking process. Another exploratory user study highlighted how professional analysts and novice users share many similarities in immersive analytic tool usage during sensemaking within IST. In addition to looking at multi-session analysis tasks, we also explored how sensemaking strategies change as users become more familiar with the immersive analytics tool usage in an exploratory study that utilized multiple analysis tasks completed over a series of three user study sessions. Lastly, we conducted a comparative user study to evaluate how the addition of new organizational features, clustering, and linking affect sensemaking within IST. Overall, our studies expanded the IST tool set and gathered an enhanced understanding of how immersive space is utilized during analysis tasks within IST. / Doctor of Philosophy / Sensemaking is a process we do in our daily lives. It is how we understand the world around us, make decisions, and complete complex analyses, like journalists writing stories or detectives solving cases. Sensemaking involves gathering information, making sense of it, developing hypotheses, and drawing conclusions, similar to writing a report. This work builds on prior work in Immersive Space to Think (IST), which is a concept of using immersive technologies (Virtual /Augmented Reality) to support sensemaking by providing vast 3D space for organizing the data used in a sensemaking task. Additionally, using these technologies to support sensemaking provides benefits such as increased space for analysis, increased engagement, and natural user interaction, which allow us to interact with information used during sensemaking tasks in new ways. In IST, users are able to move virtual documents around in the space around them to support their analysis process. In this work, we ran a study focused on multi-session analysis within IST, revealing how users refined their document placements over time while completing sensemaking tasks within IST. We also ran a study to understand how professional analysts' and novice users' analysis with IST differed in the IST tool usage. In another user study, we explored how users' strategies for sensemaking and document layouts changed as they became more familiar with the IST tool. Lastly, we conducted a comparative user study to evaluate how new features like clustering and linking affected analysis within IST. Overall, our work contributed to an enhanced understanding of how immersive space is utilized during analysis tasks within IST.

The General Engineering Program exists at Virginia Tech to provide curriculums that engage, challenge and support entry-level engineers. One important part of this initiative is helping students identify with a specific engineering branch, and overtime develop an identity within it. Yet, there exists little research on what entry-level engineers believe it means to be an engineer, especially during these stages of early formation and continual shifting. In order to generate insight on this topic we developed a contextual inquiry method to help inquire into engineering identity. Two participants were placed in an online chatroom and allowed to talk for ten minutes, with one trying to answer the question 'Am I talking to an engineer or not?' and asked to give their reasoning. Comparisons allow entry-level engineering students to articulate their beliefs on what characteristics, behaviors and personalities make up their cohort -- thus exposing their ideas about identity. Moreover, this methodology also provides opportunities for participants to critique their own bias and further develop and expose their opinions on identity. Additionally, our findings showcase the complexity around student's perceptions of engineers. For example, participants' responses pointed to: many sources that inform identity, the difficulty of identifying what is uniquely engineering, how identity is impacted by the ideal image of an engineer, that identity is a spectrum, and that identity varies with respect to associations and time. As a result, through our inquiry and representation of results we demonstrate the validity of our methodology as a HCI research tool along with the power of narrative forms of representation. / Master of Science / The General Engineering Program exists at Virginia Tech to provide curriculums that engage, challenge and support entry-level engineers. One important part of this initiative is helping students identify with a specific type of engineering, and overtime develop an identity within it. Yet, there exists little research on what entry-level engineers believe it means to be an engineer, especially during their freshmen year of college when they are still forming and changing their ideas about engineering identity. In order to generate insight on this topic we developed a methodology to help inquire into engineering identity. Two participants at a time were placed in an online chatroom and allowed to talk for ten minutes, with one trying to answer the question ‘Am I talking to an engineer or not?’ and asked to give their reasoning. Comparisons allow entry-level engineering students to articulate their beliefs on what characteristics, behaviors and personalities make up their cohort -- thus exposing their ideas about identity. Moreover, this methodology also provides opportunities for participants to critique their own assumptions about engineering identity and further develop and expose their opinions on identity. Additionally, our findings showcase the complexity around student’s perceptions of engineers. For example, participants’ responses pointed to: many sources that inform identity, the difficulty of identifying what is uniquely engineering, how identity is impacted by the ideal image of an engineer, that identity is a spectrum, and that identity varies with respect to associations and time. As a result, through our inquiry and representation of results we demonstrate the validity of our methodology as a Human Computer Interaction research tool along with the power of using written stories to represent results.

High-dimensional data appear in all domains and it is challenging to explore. As the number of dimensions in datasets increases, the harder it becomes to discover patterns and develop insights. Data analysis and exploration is an important skill given the amount of data collection in every field of work. However, learning this skill without an understanding of high-dimensional data is challenging. Users naturally tend to characterize data in simplistic one-dimensional terms using metrics such as mean, median, mode. Real-world data is more complex. To gain the most insight from data, users need to recognize and create high-dimensional arguments. Data exploration methods can encourage thinking beyond traditional one-dimensional insights. Dimension reduction algorithms, such as multidimensional scaling, support data explorations by reducing datasets to two dimensions for visualization. Because these algorithms rely on underlying parameterizations, they may be manipulated to assess the data from multiple perspectives. Manipulating can be difficult for users without a strong knowledge of the underlying algorithms. Visual analytics tools that afford object-level interaction (OLI) allow for generation of more complex insights, despite inexperience with multivariate data or the underlying algorithm. The goal of this research is to develop and test variations on types of interactions for interactive visual analytic systems that enable users to tweak model parameters directly or indirectly so that they may explore high-dimensional data. To study interactive data analysis, we present an interface, Andromeda, that enables non-experts of statistical models to explore domain-specific, high-dimensional data. This application implements interactive weighted multidimensional scaling (WMDS) and allows for both parametric and observation-level interaction to provide in-depth data exploration. We performed multiple user studies to answer how parametric and object-level interaction aid in data analysis. With each study, we found usability issues and then designed solutions for the next study. With each critique we uncovered design principles of effective, interactive, visual analytic tools. The final part of this research presents these principles supported by the results of our multiple informal and formal usability studies. The established design principles focus on human-centered usability for developing interactive visual analytic systems that enable users to analyze high-dimensional data through object-level interaction. / Ph. D.

With the growth of wearable devices capable of measuring physiological signals, affective computing is becoming more popular than before that gradually will remove our cognitive approach. One of the physiological signals is the electrodermal activities (EDA) signal. We explore how video stimulus that might arouse fear affect the EDA signal. To better understand EDA signal, two different medians, a scene from a movie and a scene from a video game, were selected to arouse fear. We conducted a user study with 20 participants and analyzed the differences between medians and proposed a method capable of detecting the highlights of the stimulus using only EDA signals. The study results show that there are no significant differences between two medians except that users are more engaged with the content of the video game. From gathered data, we propose a similarity measurement method for clustering different users based on how common they reacted to different highlights. The result shows for 300 seconds stimulus, using a window size of 10 seconds, our approach for detecting highlights of the stimulus has the precision of one for both medians, and F1 score of 0.85 and 0.84 for movie and video game respectively. / Master of Science / In this work, we explore different approaches to analyze and cluster EDA signals. Two different medians, a scene from a movie and a scene from a video game, were selected to arouse fear. By conducting a user study with 20 participants, we analyzed the differences between two medians and proposed a method capable of detecting highlights of the video clip using only EDA signals. The result of the study, shows there are no significant differences between two medians except that users are more engaged to the content of the video game. From gathered data, we propose a similarity measurement method for clustering different user based on how common they reacted to different highlights.

Smart built environments (SBE) include fundamentally different and enhanced capabilities compared to the traditional built environments. Traditional built environments consist of basic building elements and plain physical objects. These objects offer primitive interactions, basic use cases and direct affordances. As a result, the traditional architectural process is completely focused on two dimensions of design, i.e., the physical environment based on context and functional requirements based on the users. Whereas, SBEs have a third dimension, computational and communication capabilities embedded with physical objects enabling enhanced affordance and multi-modal interaction with the surrounding environment. As a result of the added capability, there is a significant change in activity pattern/spatial use pattern in an SBE. So, the traditional architectural design process needs to be modified to meet the unique requirements of SBE design. The aim of this thesis is to modify the traditional architectural design process by introducing SBE requirements. Secondly, this thesis explores a reference implementation of immersive technology based SBE design framework. The traditional architectural design tools are not always enough to represent, visualize or model the vast amount of data and digital components of SBE. SBE empowered with IoT needs a combination of the virtual and real world to assist in the design, evaluation and interaction process. A detailed discussion explored the required capabilities for facilitating an MR-based SBE design approach. An immersive technology is particularly helpful for SBE design because SBEs offer novel interaction scenarios and complex affordance which can be tested using immersive techniques. / Master of Science / Smart built environments (SBE) are fundamentally different from our everyday built environments. SBEs have enhanced capabilities compared to the traditional built environments because computational and communication capabilities are embedded with everyday objects in case of SBEs. An wall or a table is no longer just a simple object rather an interactive component that can process information and communicate with people or other devices. The introduction of these smart capabilities in physical environment leads to change in user's everyday activity pattern. So the spatial design approach also needs to be reflect these changes. As a result, the traditional architectural design process needs to be modified for designing SBEs. The aim of this thesis is to introduce a modified SBE design process based on the traditional architectural design process. Secondly, this thesis explores an immersive technology (e.g.- mixed reality, virtual reality etc.) based SBE design framework. The traditional architectural design tools mostly provide two dimensional representations like sketches or renderings. But two dimensional drawings are not always enough to represent, visualize or model the vast amount of data and digital components associated with SBE. The SBE design process needs enhanced capabilities to represent the interdependency of connected devices and interaction scenarios with people. Immersive technology can be introduced to address this problem, to test the proposed SBE in a virtual/mixed reality environment and to test the proposed 'smartness' of the objects. This thesis explores the potentials of this type of immersive technology based SBE design approach.