Since conventional audio-video teleconferencing systems have reached their limits, the needs of integrating new sensations to improve users' telecommunication experience are growing. Haptics, the sense of touch, which includes handshake, comforting hug, encouraging pat, and other physical contacts, is of great importance for interpersonal communication, since it allows people to express and receive intimate affection, intention or emotion efficiently. Motivated by a few haptic telecommunication softwares, this thesis presents an innovative webcam-based touchscreen to replace the haptic device, which is used in HugMe system as human hand, to further increase people's degree of immersion with the audio-video-haptic teleconferencing system at a more reasonable price. With our webcam-based touchscreen, the user could directly use his/her bare hand to touch the image of the person who he/she is chatting with, instead of controlling a haptic device as the medium to realize indirect touch. This thesis also gives details of the touchscreen method and our proposed mathematical models for touch position calculation. Experimental results show that our system is accurate and robust, while maintaining high compatibility with conventional audio-video teleconferencing systems for combination. With our haptic jacket, the passive user can feel the touch of the active user at the right position. Also, additional applications with the touchscreen, such as writing and drawing, are developed and tested. Finally, we draw the conclusions and talk about future work.

Since conventional audio-video teleconferencing systems have reached their limits, the needs of integrating new sensations to improve users' telecommunication experience are growing. Haptics, the sense of touch, which includes handshake, comforting hug, encouraging pat, and other physical contacts, is of great importance for interpersonal communication, since it allows people to express and receive intimate affection, intention or emotion efficiently. Motivated by a few haptic telecommunication softwares, this thesis presents an innovative webcam-based touchscreen to replace the haptic device, which is used in HugMe system as human hand, to further increase people's degree of immersion with the audio-video-haptic teleconferencing system at a more reasonable price. With our webcam-based touchscreen, the user could directly use his/her bare hand to touch the image of the person who he/she is chatting with, instead of controlling a haptic device as the medium to realize indirect touch. This thesis also gives details of the touchscreen method and our proposed mathematical models for touch position calculation. Experimental results show that our system is accurate and robust, while maintaining high compatibility with conventional audio-video teleconferencing systems for combination. With our haptic jacket, the passive user can feel the touch of the active user at the right position. Also, additional applications with the touchscreen, such as writing and drawing, are developed and tested. Finally, we draw the conclusions and talk about future work.

Since conventional audio-video teleconferencing systems have reached their limits, the needs of integrating new sensations to improve users' telecommunication experience are growing. Haptics, the sense of touch, which includes handshake, comforting hug, encouraging pat, and other physical contacts, is of great importance for interpersonal communication, since it allows people to express and receive intimate affection, intention or emotion efficiently. Motivated by a few haptic telecommunication softwares, this thesis presents an innovative webcam-based touchscreen to replace the haptic device, which is used in HugMe system as human hand, to further increase people's degree of immersion with the audio-video-haptic teleconferencing system at a more reasonable price. With our webcam-based touchscreen, the user could directly use his/her bare hand to touch the image of the person who he/she is chatting with, instead of controlling a haptic device as the medium to realize indirect touch. This thesis also gives details of the touchscreen method and our proposed mathematical models for touch position calculation. Experimental results show that our system is accurate and robust, while maintaining high compatibility with conventional audio-video teleconferencing systems for combination. With our haptic jacket, the passive user can feel the touch of the active user at the right position. Also, additional applications with the touchscreen, such as writing and drawing, are developed and tested. Finally, we draw the conclusions and talk about future work.

abstract: The purpose of the study is to gain a better understanding of baby boomers' attitudes toward video chat applications and software based on their user experiences through the measurement of the level of use, usefulness, usability and aesthetics preferences. 133 participants recruited at a local public library and at three senior centers took the survey and 14 respondents were interviewed. The results of the study indicate: (1) Baby boomers have diverse attitudes and experiences in video chatting, but their attitudes do not present a significant difference from those of older generations; (2) Baby boomers' preferences for interface design are influenced by their psychological characteristics rather than physical changes; (3) Family members and close friends are a great resource for assistance and motivation for boomers. The knowledge of motivational factors and barrier factors could help maintain the existing baby boomer users and encourage potential users by providing an improved video chat experience design for them to connect with younger generations. This research could also lead social services into the telehealth age by bridging the gap between a traditional intervention and modern instant video communication. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Design 2014

This c-level essay examines how deaf and hearing impaired individuals use smartphones to live and communicate in a “hearing world”. The main target is to find some understanding of the struggles of this population and smartphones have made it easier to adapt to the hearing worlds’ demands with the applications that follow. To acquire the information for this essay, representatives from both the deaf and hearing impaired communities were interviewed. The findings of this qualitative study show that there are many applications that have advantages to aid the lives of deaf and hearing impaired. These include WhatsApp, Tango and many others. All of the respondents appreciated the new technology but also said that there is work to be done in that area. Especially the poor quality of the video calls is not satisfactory to the users using sign language.

The focus of this thesis is to investigate whether adding video communication inonline multiplayer video games will affect the game experience. The work uses usercentered design and a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. Literaturereview, pre-study questionnaire and semi-structured interviews are used to create aprototype of a video chat overlay that can be used in games. The prototype is thenused in a quasi-experiment to test if adding a video chat will result in better gameexperience. Participants in the experiment play the same online multiplayer videogame without and with video chat overlay and fill out a game experiencequestionnaire after each condition. The GEQ scores after the two conditions arecompared using a Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test. Results showed that adding videochat did not improve the game experience significantly. If a video chat would becreated for use in video games, it is important to keep it simple and easy to use.Regarding the effect of video chat on game experience, with the prototype designedfor this work, the null hypothesis could not be rejected since there was no significantdifference in the game experience.

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Masters of Science / Communication tools such as text-based instant messaging, voice and video relay services, real-time video chat and mobile SMS and MMS have successfully been used among Deaf people. Several years of field research with a local Deaf community revealed that disadvantaged South African Deaf people preferred to communicate with both Deaf and hearing peers in South African Sign Language as opposed to text.Synchronous video chat and video relay services provided such opportunities. Both types of services are commonly available in developed regions, but not in developing countries like South Africa. This thesis reports on a workaround approach to design and develop an asynchronous video communication tool that adapted synchronous video codecs to store-and-forward video delivery. This novel asynchronous video tool provided high quality South African Sign Language video chat at the expense of some additional latency. Synchronous video codec adaptation consisted of comparing codecs,and choosing one to optimise in order to minimise latency and preserve video quality.Traditional quality of service metrics only addressed real-time video quality and related services. There was no such standard for asynchronous video communication. Therefore, we also enhanced traditional objective video quality metrics with subjective assessment metrics conducted with the local Deaf community.