Physical properties of objects are some of the features that are lost when users are immersed in today's virtual environments that usually only provide visual and auditory stimuli. In a quest to recover the physical perception of touch, in this work, we present two different studies to assess how force feedback applied solely on the wrist can convey weight. This localized approach is implemented with a wearable device, which is an advantage regarding mobility. Part of our motivation comes from balance tasks that involve interaction with objects, where there is a need to perceive their weight.We first propose an experiment to assess how we can use the force feedback on the wrist to alter the weight perception when manipulating physical props in VR.Then, we implement and evaluate two experiments in several days setting with a single participant, using only virtual representations of the objects. In the first experiment, we propose a task involving ordering objects, from the lightest to the heaviest. The second experiment also assesses weight perception, but at this time, asking the participants to compare only two objects grabbed at distinct points. In both procedures, the tasks are repeated hundreds of times to remove any bias that can come from memorizing the orders and combinations presented. From these studies, we found that the force stimuli localized on the wrist are sufficient to convey weight information. We also found that grabbing the objects at different points affects the perceived weight to a certain extent due to how the two motion axes of the wrist are placed. The behavior we observed in weight discrimination, and its limitations are equivalent to the ones found in previous studies performed using real weights.Besides these studies, an additional contribution of this work is an effective experimental design relying on a single participant in a long term setting.

In the past three decades, using Augmented Reality (AR) in repair tasks has received a growing amount of attention from researchers, because AR provides the users with a more immersive experience than traditional methods, e.g., instructional booklets, and audio, and video content. However, traditional methods are mostly used today, because there are several key challenges to using AR in repair tasks. These challenges include device limita- tions, object pose tracking, human-computer interaction, and authoring. Fortunately, the research community is investigating these challenges actively. The vision of this thesis is to move the AR technology towards being widely used in this field. Under this vision, I propose an AR platform for repair tasks and address the challenges of device limitations and authoring. The platform contains a new authoring ap- proach that tracks the real components on the expert’s side to monitor her or his operations. The proposed approach gives experts a novel authoring tool to specify 6DoF movements of a component and apply the geometrical and physical constraints in real-time. To ad- dress the challenge of device limitations, I present a hybrid remote rendering framework for applications on mobile devices. In my remote rendering approach, I adopt a client-server model, where the server is responsible for rendering high-fidelity models, encoding the ren- dering results and sending them to the client, while the client renders low-fidelity models and overlays the high-fidelity frames received from the server on its rendering results. With this configuration, we are able to minimize the bandwidth requirements and interaction latency, since only key models are rendered in high-fidelity mode. I perform a quantitive analysis on the effectiveness of my proposed remote rendering method. Moreover, I conduct a user study on the subjective and objective effects of the remote rendering method on the user experience. The results show that key model fidelity has a significant influence on the objective task difficulty, while interaction latency plays an important role in the subjective task difficulty. The results of the user study show how my method can benefit the users while minimizing resource requirements. By conducting a user study for the AR remote assistance platform, I show that the proposed AR plat- form outperforms traditional instructional videos and sketching. Through questionnaires provided at the end of the experiment, I found that the proposed AR platform receives higher recommendation than sketching, and, compared to traditional instructional videos, it stands out in terms of instruction clarity, preference, recommendation and confidence of task completion. Moreover, as to the overall user experience, the proposed method has an advantage over the video method.

Background. E-mail phishing is a type of social engineering where the threat actor sends e-mails with the intention to, for example, gain sensitive information or gain access to sensitive assets. Anyone can be a target of a phishing attempt, and any user that uses a digital environment should be aware of which factors to be attentive to in an e-mail. Objectives. This thesis intends to study the practical ability to identify phishing e-mails among users and what factors they are looking for when performing the classification. The intention is also to investigate if subjective knowledge impacts practical ability. Methods. A user study was conducted where the participants were to classify e-mails from an inbox as either phishing or legitimate. During the observation, the participants thought-out-loud for the authors of this thesis to hear their approach and which factors they noticed. A questionnaire also was conducted to capture the participants' knowledge, previous experience, and confidence in their classifications. Results. The results show that the majority of the participants did not know what factors to look after, nor how to inspect them, to make a justified classification of an e-mail. Most participants made the classifications based on their gut feelings. Those participants who had any theoretical knowledge showed more confidence and identified more phishing attempts. Conclusions. This thesis concluded that the participants lacked the required knowledge to identify phishing attempts. Further, it concludes that subjective knowledge leads to high confidence, which helps users make the correct classification. Therefore, this topic needs to be further enlightened to bring more awareness, and education needs to be conducted.

I report on the iterative process of designing a mobile AI poetry system, along with a series of broad scale use cases in which different variants of the system has been tested in the wild. The project has so far resulted in the generation of about 20 million individual poems, co-created by the system together with millions of users. Apart from the design of the technical side of the system, my focus has been on how the system could be adapted to and deployed in different commercial settings. I discuss my insights related to systems support for creative processes, and how findings from these use cases could be applicable also to other AI content generation systems. / Här beskrivs den iterativa utformningen av en mobilapplikation för AI-genererad poesi, samt en serie storskaliga kommersiella kampanjer där olika varianter av systemet har testats i verklig användning. Genom detta genererades cirka 20 miljoner enskilda dikter, producerade av systemet tillsammans med miljontals användare. Förutom systemets tekniska funktionalitet beskrivs hur systemet anpassats för att distribueras i olika kommersiella sammanhang. Utifrån denna process diskuteras insikter relaterade till systemstöd för kreativa processer, och hur lärdomar från denna process kan tillämpas även i andra system för AI-genererat innehåll.

The need for annotated corpora in a variety of different types of research grows constantly. Unfortunately creating annotated corpora is frequently cost-prohibitive due the number of person-hours required to create the corpus. This project investigates one solution that helps to reduce the cost of creating annotated corpora through the use of a new user interface which includes a specially built framework and component for annotating part-of-speech information and the implementation of a dictionary. This project reports on a user study performed to determine the effect of dictionaries with different levels of coverage on a part-of-speech annotation task. Based on a pilot study with thirty-three participants the analysis shows that a part-of-speech tag dictionary with greater than or equal to 60% coverage helps to improve the time required to complete the part-of-speech annotation task while maintaining high levels of accuracy.

Aircraft-mounted cameras have potential to greatly increase the effectiveness of wilderness search and rescue efforts by collecting photographs or video of the search area. The more data that is collected, the more difficult it becomes to process it by visual inspection alone. This work presents a method for automatically detecting unusual objects in aerial video to assist people in locating signs of missing persons in wilderness areas. The detector presented here makes use of anomaly detection methods originally designed for hyperspectral imagery. Multiple anomaly detection methods are considered, implemented, and evaluated. These anomalies are then aggregated into spatiotemporal objects by using the video's inherent spatial and temporal redundancy. The results are therefore summarized into a list of unusual objects to enhance the search technician's video review interface. In the user study reported here, unusual objects found by the detector were overlaid on the video during review. This increased participants' ability to find relevant objects in a simulated search without significantly affecting the rate of false detection. Other effects and possible ways to improve the user interface are also discussed.

This dissertation develops new approaches for hyperspectral image visualization. Double and multiple layers are proposed to effectively convey the abundant information contained in the original high-dimensional data for practical decision-making support. The contributions of this dissertation are as follows. 1.Development of new visualization algorithms for hyperspectral imagery. Double-layer technique can display mixed pixel composition and global material distribution simultaneously. The pie-chart layer, taking advantage of the properties of non-negativity and sum-to-one abundances from linear mixture analysis of hyperspectral pixels, can be fully integrated with the background layer. Such a synergy enhances the presentation at both macro and micro scales. 2.Design of an effective visual exploration tool. The developed visualization techniques are implemented in a visualization system, which can automatically preprocess and visualize hyperspectral imagery. The interactive tool with a userriendly interface will enable viewers to display an image with any desired level of details. 3.Design of effective user studies to validate and improve visualization methods. The double-layer technique is evaluated by well designed user studies. The traditional approaches, including gray-scale side-by-side classification maps, color hard classification maps, and color soft classification maps, are compared with the proposed double-layer technique. The results of the user studies indicate that the double-layer algorithm provides the best performance in displaying mixed pixel composition in several aspects and that it has the competitive capability of displaying the global material distribution. Based on these results, a multi-layer algorithm is proposed to improve global information display.

Electronic surveillance operators are a vital part of electronic warfare. Included in their field of responsibility is the analysis of, the assessment of, and the actions on potential threats. A vital component of these is an operator’s situation awareness. It governs to what degree of confidence and accuracy these aspects can be determined. An interface of an electronic surveillance operator must therefor be designed to provide and improve situation awareness. A technology that is hypothesized to improve situation awareness is virtual reality. Through its head-mounted display and handheld controllers it is aimed to create immersion and generate natural interactions. Information can be closely explored through new perspectives and the entire body can be used to interact with interfaces. These aspects and the additional dimension provided by virtual reality are the factors expected to improve situation awareness. The aim of this study is to explore the effects for situation awareness with a 3D interface in virtual reality compared to a traditional 2D interface for electronic surveillance operators. A user-centric approach was selected to evaluate how an existing 2D interface for electronic surveillance operators compares to a novel 3D interface in virtual reality. The existing interface is provided by Saab AB, and the 3D interface is developed for this particular case. Furthermore, a wrist-mounted menu and a stationary dashboard menu were implemented in virtual reality to support minimal implementation bias and for further discussion on interactions in virtual reality. The results indicate improved situation awareness in the virtual reality 3D interface. This is complemented by users’ reflections to generate a discussion for design guidelines, whether traditional interfaces may be replaced by virtual reality interfaces, and what effects virtual reality has on situation awareness. / Operatörer för elektronisk övervakning är en viktig del av elektronisk krigföring. Inkluderat i deras ansvarsområde är analysen av, bedömningen av, och åtgärderna mot potentiella hot. En viktig komponent i dessa är en operatörs lägesuppfattning. Den styr i vilken grad av tillförlitlighet och noggrannhet dessa aspekter kan fastställas. Ett gränssnitt för dessa operatörer måste därför utformas för att ge och förbättra lägesuppfattning. En teknik som antas förbättra lägesuppfattningen är virtuell verklighet. Genom bildskärmar som bärs på huvudet och handhållna kontroller syftar den till att skapa immersion och naturliga interaktioner. Information kan utforskas på nära håll genom nya perspektiv och hela kroppen kan användas för att interagera med gränssnittet. Dessa aspekter och den ytterligare dimension som virtuell verklighet ger är de faktorer som förväntas förbättra lägesuppfattning. Syftet med denna studie är att utforska effekterna för lägesuppfattning med ett 3D-gränssnitt i virtuell verklighet jämfört med ett traditionellt 2D-gränssnitt för elektroniska övervakningsoperatörer. Ett användarcentrerat tillvägagångssätt valdes för att utvärdera hur ett befintligt 2D-gränssnitt för elektroniska övervakningsoperatörer kan jämföras med ett nytt 3D-gränssnitt i virtuell verklighet. Det befintliga gränssnittet tillhandahålls av Saab AB och 3D-gränssnittet är utvecklat för just detta fall. Dessutom implementerades en handledsmonterad meny och en stationär instrumentpanelmeny i virtuell verklighet för att stödja minimal implementeringsbias och för ytterligare diskussion om interaktioner i virtuell verklighet. Resultaten indikerar förbättrad situationsmedvetenhet i 3D-gränssnittet för virtuell verklighet. Detta kompletteras med användarnas reflektioner för att generera en diskussion för designriktlinjer, om traditionella gränssnitt kan ersättas med virtuella verklighetsgränssnitt och vilka effekter virtuell verklighet har på lägesuppfattning.

An anonymous company has been redesigning its website to a responsive site and during this process the users have the option to stay on either site. This study examined the reasons as to why users stay on the non-responsive site and how the responsive site could be improved to make them switch to it. In order to understand how users were effected by first impressions and age as well as how adaption to technology works, previous research in these areas have been presented. A survey and user test were conducted to find the answers to the research question. Because the transformation to a responsive site meant that the visual structure changed, it affected the users’ existing habits. The results and conclusion were that there were three major groups stating different main reasons on what would make them go to the responsive site. The strategy for making users on the non-responsive site more satisfied with the responsive site would be to first implement missing functionality. The next step would be to invite all users and adding guides to help them to learn how to find what they usually look for. / Ett anonymt företag har arbetat med att designa om sin hemsida till att bli responsiv och under den här processen har användarna haft möjlighet att stanna på båda websidorna. Den här studien undersökte varför vissa användare stannade på den icke responsiva sidan och hur den responsiva sidan kan förbättras för att få dem att byta till den. För att förstå hur användare påverkades av första intryck och ålder samt hur anpassning till teknik fungerar har tidigare forskning inom dessa områden presenterats. En enkät och användartest utfördes för att svara på frågeställningen. Eftersom en övergång till en responsiv sida innebar att den visuella strukturen ändrades påverkades användares redan existerande vanor. Resultatet och slutsatsen var att det fanns tre huvudgrupper som angav olika anledningar till vad som skulle få dem att gå över till den responsiva sidan. Strategin för att få användarna på den icke responsiva sidan mer nöjda med den responsiva sidan skulle vara att först implementera de funktioner som saknas. Nästa steg skulle vara att bjuda in alla användare och att skapa guider för att hjälpa dem att lära sig hur de hittar det de oftast letar efter.

This study explored the relatively new field of public mobile handheld AR and how the touchscreen-based input of smartphones affects the way users aged 10-12 interact with the 6DOF (6 degrees of freedom) that AR provides. Two experiments were performed, one in a public museum setting and one in a private school setting. A statistical analysis was performed between non-restricted and restricted touchscreen-based input. Quantitative and qualitative data was gathered through semi structured interviews and non-participant observations. Results show no statistical significance between the physical distance moved of the smartphone and the restriction of touchscreen-based input. Qualitative data show a different software application may yield different results. / Den här studien utforskade det relativt nya området inom offentlig mobil handhållen förstärkt verklighet och hur den pekskärmsbaserade interaktionen av mobila enheter påverkar sättet användare med åldrar 10-12 interagerar med de sex frihetsgrader som förstärkt verklighet möjliggör. Två experiment utfördes, det ena i en publik miljö på ett museum och det andra i en privat miljö på en skola. En statistisk analys utfördes mellan begränsad och icke-begränsad pekskärms interaktion. Kvantitativ och kvalitativ data samlades genom semi-strukturerade intervjuer och icke-deltagande observationer. Resultatet visar på att det inte finns någon statiskt signifikant skillnad mellan den fysiska rörelsen av den mobila enheten och begränsningen av pekskärmsinteraktionen. Den kvalitativa datan visar dock att en annorlunda implementation av mjukvaran kan ge andra resultat.