“Out of Your Mind!? Embodied Interaction in Sports”
– two-day Workshop at CHI2021, Yokohama, Japan.

This workshop aims at exploring how interactive systems can enhance sports experiences beyond performance – highlighting an Embodied Interaction perspective. Activities include hands-on discussion on state-of-the-art research on embodied interaction and sports in HCI, and developing tangible concepts that enhance sports experiences.

Topics of interest include:

  • Sensory Augmentation
    • Motor Memory
    • Sonification
    • EMS
    • Augmented Experiences
    • Wearables
    • Multimodal Interaction
    • Adapted physical activity (APA)

To apply to the workshop, submit your answers to the questions on the Google form, also linked on our website. Here, you should address 3 good and 3 bad examples of embodied interaction in sports arguing the choice of the examples (max 1 good example created by the author). Responses will be reviewed by the workshop organizers, and selected for inclusion based on quality, novelty, and potential to engender discussion, while aiming for a balance of different perspectives. Accepted authors will be notified by February 28, 2021 and the list of participants will be posted on the website sports-hci.com. All participants must register for the workshop and for at least one day of the conference.

Important dates:
• Position paper deadline: February 21, 2021
• Acceptance notification: February 28, 2021
• Workshop at CHI2020: May 8th or 9th, 2021

More Information: https://sports-hci.com

This year’s International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications (AUI ’18) took place from 23rd to 25th of September in Toronto, Canada. Nicole Perterer and Sandra Trösterer attended the conference, conducting different workshops and presenting their work:

Papers

Workshops

The next AutomotiveUI (AUI ’19) will take place from 22nd to 25th September 2019 in Utrecht, Netherlands.

A recently published journal article of the Center for HCI, published with Frontiers in Robotics and AI, is currently making the global headlines!

In the article we report on a study on social robots where we found that people liked a robot that makes errors considerably more than a robot that operated free from error. At first this finding sounds surprising, but when we think about it from a social perspective it makes sense. Perfect individuals only remind us about our own shortcomings, which makes them seem more distant an less likeable. This phenomenon is called Pratfall Effect and it dates back to the 1960s. With our results we could successfully demonstrate that this social psychological phenomenon known from interpersonal interaction can be transferred to human-robot interaction likewise.

Some of the media coverage included Medical Research, Digital Trends, IFL Science, and The Verge.

Nicole Mirnig also talked about our recent research on the drive time show at ABC Radio Melbourne. You can listen to the clip here:

Access the full open access article here.

 

From August 26-31, Manuel Giuliani, Nicole Mirnig, Susanne Stadler and Gerald Stollnberger attended this year’s RO-MAN conference in New York. This year, Ro-MAN was held for the 25th time. The anniversary edition of this well-established conference series was dedicated to acknowledging the progress in the robotics field.

The team presented four papers and covered a variety of emerging topics: “Robot Humor: How Self-Irony and Schadenfreude Influence People’s Rating of Robot Likability” (Nicole), “Augmented Reality for Industrial Robot Programmers: Workload Analysis for Task-based, Augmented Reality-supported Robot Control” (Susanne), “User Requirements for a Medical Robotic System: Enabling Doctors to Remotely Conduct Ultrasonography and Physical Examination” (Gerald); and Gerald’s Paper “Designing User Interfaces for Different User Groups: A Three-way Teleconference System for Doctors, Patients and Assistants Using a Remote Medical Robot” which was nominated for Best Design Paper Award.

Manuel co-organized the 3rd Workshop on Public Space Human-Robot Interaction. The workshop series is intended to explore robots in public space from different perspectives. Nicole co-organized the 2nd Workshop on Evaluation Methods for Standardization in Human-Robot Interaction. This workshop series is dedicated to establishing reliable metrics and benchmarks for social robots.

The talks and workshops were well-received and resulted in a notable media response:

Yara Meilinger and Jared Lerchner, two high school students, completed a 4-weeks internship at the Center for Human-Computer Interaction during July and August 2016.

They worked together with the Human-Robot Interaction Group on the topic social robots. The students were given the unique possibility to go through an entire scientific research process, including a literature survey to consolidate a research question, the development of an idea for an online survey, the setup of an online survey, and data analysis.

In their online survey the students researched how humans perceive an social robot that exhibits humorous traits. They programmed the humanoid robot NAO to work as a receptionist and greet visitors to the Center during an event. Thereby, the robot exhibited different forms of humor.

To participate in the survey, click here.

Once the data collection is finished, the students will analyze the collected data and they are expected to yield in interesting findings.

From March 7 – 10th, Nicole Mirnig attended the 11th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction in Christchurch, New Zealand.

The HRI Conference is a highly selective annual international conference that aims to showcase the very best interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research in human-robot interaction with roots in and broad participation from communities that include but not limited to robotics, human-computer interaction, human factors, artificial intelligence, engineering, and social and behavioral sciences. This year’s conference theme was ‘Natural Interaction’.

Nicole co-organized the workshop ‘The challenge (not) to go wild! Challenges and best practices to study HRI in natural interaction settings‘ with  Astrid Rosenthal-von der Pütten (University of Duisburg-Essen), Astrid Weiss (Vienna University of Technology) and Selma Sabanovic (Indiana University). Nicole presented her paper ‘Evaluating a Questionnaire for Contextual Inquiries on Industrial Robot Teaching’ in the workshop.

On the 22nd of April 2016, the Lange Nacht der Forschung (long night of research) took place in Austria and the Center for HCI presented its research to visitors during the event.

What will Human-Machine Interaction of the Future look like?

Our main topic for this years Lange Nacht der Forschung was the future of HCI. At our station in the Sala Terrena, we showed ongoing research related to active ageing, human-robot interaction, production, and driving of the future, all representing and tackling highly relevant issues for todays societies, to be deeply explored for desirable futures.

Christiane Moser and Alina Krischkowsky presented GeTVivid, a peer-to-peer support exchange platform. Thereby, the visitors had the opportunity to try out the system on a TV, complemented with a second screen on a tablet. Katja Neureiter and Johannes Vollmer started a Design Challenge concerning the ProMe project, which is a platform aiming to facilitate professional intergenerational cooperation. They invited the visitors to sketch their ideas and suggestions to improve the layout of the search functionality. Many interesting insights could be identified that will now be used to inform further developments of the platform.

Manuel Giuliani, Susanne Meerwald-Stadler, Nicole Mirnig, and Gerald Stollnberger presented visitors with some latest trends in Human-Robot Interaction. The visitors had the chance to experience augmented reality for controlling a robot first-hand. The researchers invited visitors to join a plank competition with the NAO robot. Most of the competitors won against the robot and showed that humans still prevail.

Introducing visitors to future factory work, Daniela Wurhofer, Thomas Meneweger, and Florian Rätzer showed a fictional job description for highly competent factory workers, working together with robots in the year 2020. The researchers discussed this scenario with interested visitors, who were also free to evaluate the displayed job characteristics regarding its probability to exist in 2020 and if it appears positive or negative to them. In general, the scenario was judged in a more positive than negative way and a large majority of visitors thought that this was a quite realistic job description for the year 2020.

Furthermore, Thomas Grah, Artur Lupp, and Sandra Trösterer built up a driving simulator and presented a shape-changing seat, which allowed visitors to haptically sense approaching cars from behind while driving in a simulation. Particularly, young visitors tried out the driving simulation and experienced this new way of providing context information to the driver using the haptic sense. Nearly all visitors could differentiate from which direction the approaching rear car was coming from. In addition, the possibilities, advantages and drawbacks of the approach were discussed with the visitors.

How good is a Personal Audio System?

In addition to our station at the Sala Terrena in Salzburg, we were further present at the castle Ranshofen (Upper Austria) together with our CDL project partner AUDIO MOBIL Elektronik GmbH (AME). Nicole Perterer and Arno Laminger presented a novel in-vehicle auditory system developed by AME, which emits auditory signals directly from within the headrest. Visitors could experience the system and compare it to a regular on-board audio system on-site via phone calls from outside to inside the vehicle, or by simply enjoying some music from a new (auditory) perspective.

From February 27th until March 3rd, 2016, Alina und Nicole attended the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing in San Francisco, CA, USA. Besides us and around 700 other conference attendees, a couple of remote telepresence robots attended the entire conference and were great conversation partners during breaks.

Together with Michael Muller (IBM Research), Katja Neureiter (Center for HCI), Nervo Verdezoto (Aarhus University),  Anna Maria Al Zubaidi-Polli (University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria), and Manfred Tscheligi (Center for HCI), Alina organized a one-day workshop on „Collaborative Appropriation: How Couples, Teams, Groups, and Communities Adapt and Adopt Technologies“. This workshop was organized as a follow-up on our previous collaborations at ECSCW’15.

On-site, Michael, Nervo, and Alina engaged in interesting discussions with the workshop participants about methods to study collaborative appropriation as well as conceptualizations and understandings of collaborative appropriation. Further, they reflected on stakeholders’ involvement when researching technology appropriation that is collectively accomplished by couples, teams, groups, or entire communities. Nicole contributed to this workshop with relevant cases of collaborative appropriation from her field and lab research in the automotive domain.

Furthermore, Nicole was part of the CSCW Doctoral Colloquium and had the opportunity to discuss her PhD topic on “Safety through Collaboration: A New Challenge for Automotive Designs” with experienced CSCW researchers, practitioners, and other PhD students. Thereby, she received valuable and constructive feedback to further advance her research. As part of the Doctoral Colloquium, she also presented her research in the poster session to the wider community.

We look very much forward to CSCW’17 – wherever it will be!

The Center for Human Computer Interaction is currently conducting an explorative study with driver-passenger pairs who are sitting in two different cars in order to explore novel approaches for communication and collaboration beyond the car. Thereby, we aim to support users with regards to decision-making and problem-solving tasks during a shared ride.  So far, 14 driver-passenger pairs have participated in the study, who needed to navigate together from point A to point B, whilst facing different tasks during the ride. For example,  “You notice that your fuel tank is empty and you need to stop at the next petrol station. Please make sure that the passengers in the other car understand that you need to make a stop at the next petrol station.” To solve the tasks, participants could make use of different means of communication and navigation they are already familiar with, e.g., their smart phone or navigation system.

The study aims at exploring how to overcome boundaries of communication and collaboration, i.e., negotiation during a ride between different driver-passenger pairs located in two separate cars. We target a deeper understanding of car2car negotiation and aim at identifying potential design challenges to improve communication and collaboration beyond the car and to inspire design ideas. Based on these results, first prototypes will be developed and evaluated in the car.

This day-long workshop on Contextual Collaboration: Where Automation and People Meet will focus on collaboration with autonomous systems and in automated environments. Due to trends towards autonomous driving and smart industrial automation people are more and more surrounded by (semi-) autonomous systems. The way people collaborate with each other in these automated environments or with autonomous systems and how they experience the interactions is of great interest for researchers and practitioners.

The goal of the workshop is address these challenges and ambiguities to initiate an in-depth discussion of present and future scenarios (e.g., close collaboration with robotic co-workers, semi-autonomous driving), which are envisioned to highly impact human-human as well as human-system collaboration. The topics of interest include:

  • What can we learn from the various automated contexts and autonomous systems regarding collaboration?
  • What research and design challenges will these contexts or systems introduce?

The outcome of the workshop will be a list of challenges (and, if already available, potential ways to address them) provided as a white paper.

The workshop is organised by Nicole Perterer, Verena Fuchsberger and Manfred Tscheligi together with Astrid Weiss (Vienna University of Technology, Austria), Volker Wulf (University of Siegen, Germany), and Klaus Bengler (Technical University of Munich, Germany).  It will take place in conjunction with COOP 2016 in Trento, Italy, on May 23rd or 24th.

The call for participation, details about the workshop and the organizers can be found on the workshop website.

Early submission deadline is 26th March and notification of acceptance is 31st March 2016!

We hope to see you in Trento in May 2016!

We look very much forward to your submission and in case you have any further questions, please contact Nicole!