Through immersive stereoscopic displays and natural user interfaces, virtual reality (VR) is capable of offering the user a sense of presence in the virtual space, and has been long expected to revolutionize how people interact with virtual content in various application scenarios. However, with many technical challenges solved over the last three decades to bring low cost and high fidelity to VR experiences, we still do not see VR technology used frequently in many seemingly suitable applications. Part of this is due to the lack of expressiveness and efficiency of traditional “simple and reality-based� 3D user interfaces (3DUIs). The challenge is especially obvious when complex interaction tasks with diverse requirements are involved, such as editing virtual objects from multiple scales, angles, perspectives, reference frames, and dimensions. A common approach to overcome such problems is through hybrid user interface (HUI) systems that combine complementary interface elements to leverage their strengths. Based on this method, the first contribution of this dissertation is the proposal of Force Extension, an interaction technique that seamlessly integrates position-controlled touch and rate-controlled force input for efficient multi-touch interaction in virtual environments. Using carefully designed mapping functions, it is capable of offering fluid transitions between the two contexts, as well as simulating shear force input realistically for multi-touch gestures. The second contribution extends the HUI concept into immersive VR by introducing a Hybrid Virtual Environment (HVE) level editing system that combines a tablet and a Head-Mounted Display (HMD). The HVE system improves user performance and experience in complex high-level world editing tasks by using a “World-In-Miniature� and 2D GUI rendered on a multi-touch tablet device to compensate for the interaction limitations of a traditional HMD- and wand-based VR system. The concept of Interaction Context (IC) is introduced to explain the relationship between tablet interaction and the immersive interaction, and four coordination mechanisms are proposed to keep the perceptual, functional, and cognitive flow continuous during IC transitions. To offer intuitive and realistic interaction experiences, most immersive 3DUIs are centered on the user’s virtual avatar, and obey the same physics rules of the real world. However, this design paradigm also employs unnecessary limitations that hinders the performance of certain tasks, such as selecting objects in cluttered space, manipulating objects in six degrees of freedom, and inspecting remote spaces. The third contribution of this dissertation proposes the Object Impersonation technique, which breaks the common assumption that one can only immerse in the VE from a single avatar, and allows the user to impersonate objects in the VE and interact from their perspectives and reference frames. This hybrid solution of avatar- and object-based interaction blurs the line between travel and object selection, creating a unique cross-task interaction experience in the immersive environment. Many traditional 3DUIs in immersive VR use simple and intuitive interaction paradigms derived from real world metaphors. But they can be just as limiting and ineffective as in the real world. Using the coordinated HUI or HVE systems presented in this dissertation, one can benefit from the complementary advantages of multiple heterogeneous interfaces (Force Extension), VE representations (HVE Level Editor), and interaction techniques (Object Impersonation). This advances traditional 3D interaction into the more powerful hybrid space, and allows future VR systems to be applied in more application scenarios to provide not only presence, but also improved productivity in people’s everyday tasks.

Computing is increasingly pervading the activities of our everyday lives: at work, at home, and out on the town. When designing these pervasive systems there is a need to better understand and incorporate the context of use and yet there are limited empirical investigations into what constitutes this context. The user’s physical and social situation is an important part of their context when operating in an urban environment and thus needs to be understood and included in the interaction design of context-aware pervasive computing. This thesis has combined ideas from human computer interaction (HCI) and architecture to investigate indexicality in interface design as an instrument for incorporating physical and social context of the built environment into context-aware pervasive computing. Indexicality in interface design is a new approach to designing HCI for pervasive computing that relies on knowledge of current context to implicitly communicate between system and user. It reduces the amount of information that needs to be explicitly displayed in the interface while maintaining the usefulness and understandability of the communication.

De nos jours, nous vivons dans un monde d'interactions. Nous sommes entourés d'appareils électroniques susceptibles de compliquer ces interactions. De plus, les utilisateurs sont dorénavant mobiles et évoluent dans des environnements changeant. Vis-à-vis de la collaboration, ces conditions peuvent inhiber la productivité. Ce projet de thèse vise à proposer des méthodes pour la conception d'interfaces utilisateur capables de tenir compte du contexte à travers l'utilisation d'interfaces adaptatives. La contribution principale de cette thèse consiste en un cadre de référence dirigé par les modèles pour la conception et l'exécution d'interfaces utilisateur adaptatives supportant des mécanismes de coordination (i.e. flux de travaux, conscience de groupe). La proposition se présente sous deux aspects : Un cadre méthodologique pour l'aide è la conception d'interfaces supportant la coordination. Il consiste essentiellement en l'emploi de méthodes de modélisation d'exigences métier via un processus itératif ; Un cadre technologique qui repose sur l'ingénierie basée sur les modèles pour permettre la génération et l'exécution d'interfaces utilisateur adaptatives. Il se base sur une architecture orientée widgets pour le support de la conscience de groupe afin de promouvoir la coordination / Nowadays, we live in a world of interactions. We are surrounded by electronic devices which tend to complexify user interactions. Moreover, users are now mobile and evolve in ever changing environments. Regarding collaboration, these conditions may inhibit productivity. This PhD aims to propose design methods for user interfaces able to consider the context through the use of adaptive user interfaces. The main contribution of this thesis consists in a model-driven reference framework for the design and the execution of adaptive user interfaces supporting coordination mecanisms (i.e. workflow, group awareness). The proposition is composed of these two facets: A methodologic framework to assist in the design of user interfaces supporting coordination. It consists in the use of iterative modelisation methods for requirements engineering; A technological framework which relies on model-based engineering to allow the generation and execution of adaptive user interfaces. It makes use of widget-based architecture to support group awareness in order to promote coordination

Natural Language Generation and generating believable verbal communication are critical components in the development of social robots. The work presented in this paper is based on the sequence-to-sequence model and is focused on improving context and repeatability through the inclusion of task- specific information. The data set on which this study was conducted was collected through a Wizard of Oz framework using a social robot. The generated dialogue was evaluated through a survey designed to measure the adherence to the game context and perceived human qualities. The human qualities were measured using attributes from two well-known attribute scales intended for evaluating Human-Robot Interaction. The evaluation results indicate that the quality of the generated dialogue is on par with examples of actual dialogue spoken during the experiments. This paper also highlights interesting aspects regarding the usefulness of transfer learning in narrow contextual applications. The results presented in this paper show that it is possible to improve the contextual nature of generated dialogue by including additional task-specific information. / Generering av naturligt språk och uppgiften att skapa trovärdig verbal kommunikation är kritiska komponenter i utvecklingen av sociala robotar. Arbetet som presenteras i denna uppsats är baserat på sekvens-till-sekvens-modellen och fokuserar på att förbättra sammanhang och repeterbarhet genom att inkludera uppgiftspecifik information. Datauppsättningen som denna studie genomförde samlades in via ett Wizard of Oz-ramverk med hjälp av en social robot. Den genererade dialogen utvärderades genom en onlineundersökning utformad för att mäta efterlevnaden av spelskontexten och upplevda mänskliga egenskaper. Dessa mänskliga egenskaper mättes med attribut från två välkända attributskalor avsedda för utvärdering av människa-robot-interaktion. Utvärderingsresultaten visar att kvaliteten på den genererade dialogen är i nivå med exempel på faktisk dialog som talats under experimenten. Denna uppsats belyser också intressanta aspekter beträffande nyttan av överföringsinlärning i smala kontextuella applikationer. Resultaten som presenteras i denna uppsats visar att det är möjligt att förbättra den kontextuella karaktären hos genererad dialog genom att inkludera ytterligare uppgiftspecifik information.

Cette thèse s’inscrit dans le domaine de l’intelligence ambiante et de l’interaction homme-machine. Elle a pour thème la génération d’interfaces homme-machine adaptées au contexte d’interaction dans les environnements ambiants. Les travaux de recherche présentés traitent des problèmes rencontrés lors de la conception d’IHM dans l'ambiant et notamment de la réutilisation de techniques d’interaction multimodales et multi-périphériques. Ce travail se divise en trois phases. La première est une étude des problématiques de l’IHM spécifiques à l’Ambiant et des architectures logicielles adaptées à ce cadre théorique. Cette étude permet d’établir les limites des approches actuelles et de proposer, dans la seconde phase, une nouvelle approche pour la conception d’IHM ambiante appelée DAME. Cette approche repose sur l’association automatique de composants logiciels qui construisent dynamiquement une IHM. Nous proposons deux modèles complémentaires qui permettent de décrire les caractéristiques ergonomiques et architecturales des composants. La conception de ces derniers est guidée par une architecture logicielle composée de plusieurs couches qui permet d’identifier les différents niveaux d’abstraction réutilisables d’un langage d’interaction. Un troisième modèle, appelé modèle comportemental, permet de spécifier des recommandations quant à l’instanciation de ces composants. Nous proposons un algorithme permettant de générer des IHM adaptées au contexte et d’évaluer la qualité de celles-ci par rapport aux recommandations du modèle comportemental. Dans la troisième phase, nous avons implémenté une plateforme réalisant la vision soutenue par DAME. Cette implémentation est confrontée aux utilisateurs finaux dans une expérience de validation qualitative. De ces travaux ressortent des résultats encourageants, ouvrant la discussion sur de nouvelles perspectives de recherche dans le cadre de l’IHM en informatique ambiante. / This thesis deals with ambient intelligence and the design of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). It studies the automatic generation of user interfaces that are adapted to the interaction context in ambient environments. This problem raises design issues that are specific to ambient HCI, particularly in the reuse of multimodal and multidevice interaction techniques. The present work falls into three parts. The first part is an analysis of state-of-the-art software architectures designed to solve those issues. This analysis outlines the limits of current approaches and enables us to propose, in the second part, a new approach for the design of ambient HCI called DAME. This approach relies on the automatic and dynamic association of software components that build a user interface. We propose and define two complementary models that allow the description of ergonomic and architectural properties of the software components. The design of such components is organized in a layered architecture that identifies reusable levels of abstraction of an interaction language. A third model, called behavioural model, allows the specification of recommendations about the runtime instantiation of components. We propose an algorithm that allows the generation of context-adapted user interfaces and the evaluation of their quality according to the recommendations issued from the behavioural model. In the third part, we detail our implementation of a platform that implements the DAME approach. This implementation is used in a qualitative experiment that involves end-users. Encouraging preliminary results have been obtained and open new perspectives on multi-devices and multimodal HCI in ambient computing.