On the 3rd of February, the Department of Computer Science organized their yearly open day for pupils (I-DAY). A variety of short lectures were attended by 160 pupils , in addition to trying out different prototypes developed by students or demonstrations at seven stations.

For the Center for HCI, Christiane Moser, Michaela Peterhansl, Cornelia Zenz, and Annabell Wieser presented their CrossMediaGame “Explore Planet Earth” at one station. The CrossMediaGame combines the best of analogue and digital games, i.e., it uses a classical approach for the board game which takes place on a patch panel and is combined with the freedom of digital games centered in the tablet app. The game is targeted for children 8-12 years, to learn about the earth while playing the game with their families.  The pupils were fascinated in the tangible nature of the user interface (i.e., the board and its game characters) and the combination with a tablet for dicing and answering questions. They were very interested in the game and asked a lot questions about the implementation and specifically about the communication of the board with the tablet.

Martin Wuchse demonstrated the combination of the Oculus Rift with a Leap Motion controller to show how reality can be embedded in a virtual reality world at another station. The pupils could experience how new technology can be combined and in which fields it would make sense to apply them to. While most of the pupils were already familiar with the Oculus Rift, they felt astonished to see their own hands in a virtual world by combining it with a Leap Motion controller. Some pupils even had already worked with the Oculus Rift in their school in the gaming context. Therefore, they were fascinated by thinking about interacting with virtual system, displayed with the Oculus Rift.

Markus Miksch provided the pupils the possibility to gather first insights and experiences in the research field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) at another station. The pupils were shown, in a live demo, how to program a NAO robot and the work completed within his bachelor thesis on how people react to robots that make a mistake. Finally, the pupils could beat the NAO in the Plank-Challenge. Despite the great physical effort the pupils had to put into the challenge, they were excited about the robot and would have loved to take it home.

Manuel Giuliani was invited to talk about the ReMeDi project at Sonophilia. This event brings together young entrepreneurs, creatives and influencers to exchange ideas. It took place on 23 January 2016 in Salzburg.

The talk was received well and the listeners asked many interesting questions afterwards. It focussed on the Center’s work on medical robotics in ReMeDi (Remote Medical Diagnostician). Manuel talked about the importance to study new human-robot interfaces in the context of its usage, like the teleoperated ReMeDi robot. The talk also gave details about involving the future users of the ReMeDi robot in designing the robot ‘s appearance and system capabilities.

One day after the main Sonophilia event, a small group of event attendees visited the Center for Human-Computer Interaction. They got a tour through the Center’s labs and got to know more about the research done at the Center.

For more information on Sonophilia, please visit www.sonophilia.com.

In line with the #chi4good spirit, the Games User Research (GUR) field must advance towards demographics that will benefit from GUR, but are currently less well represented. This includes small, independent developers, non-profit organizations and academics that create mobile games, games for health or change, and educational games. This workshop on “Lightweight Games User Research for Indies and Non-Profit Organizations” will be a think tank focused on developing methodological and practical solutions for anyone who creates games with minimal resources.

This GUR workshop is the first of its kind in that it focuses on lightweight methods for GUR, for example, quick and dirty user experience setups and methods, low-expertise requirement approaches or low cost adaptations of eye-tracking methods to evaluate games user interfaces. Ultimately, the workshop serves as a springboard towards building a community of user researchers around the common issues and approaches when dealing with low budgeted projects.

Our goal is to understand, investigate, promote and provide the value of GUR for small companies and –initiatives and any other situation where resources are minimal. We are interested to find out how developers and academics can benefit from existing GUR strategies, tools, and techniques given the specific context of small-scale development; or how these need to be modified, adapted, or re-thought to meet actual needs. This is notably in terms of resource cost, zero training need, high value-to-cost ratio, as well as automation and remote testing capacities. The outcome of this workshop will be a collection of DIY (Do-It-Yourself) best practices, guidelines, tools, and techniques for this target group that are simple, lightweight, and cheap to apply.

The call for participation, details about the workshop and the organizers can be found on the workshop website. Early submission deadline is December 18th and final submission deadline is January 13th, 2016!

We hope to see you in San José in May 2016!

Nicole Mirnig attended the 7th International Conference on Social Robotics which was hosted from October 26th – 30th, in Paris, France.

The ICSR conferences focus on the interaction between humans and robots and the integration of robots into our society. With the conference theme “Individual Differences”, this year’s edition of the conference series again united researchers and partitioners in order to discuss the latest progress in the field of social robotics. The program featured a wide variety of latest trends in social robotics research, which were presented as talks, posters and workshops.

Nicole gave a talk on her paper “Impact of Robot Actions on Social Signals and Reaction Times in HRI Error Situations”. The paper is the second in a row of publications from the HRI group at the Center for HCI. The group focuses on researching errors in interactions with robots and using this knowledge to make robots more acceptable. This, in turn, will help improving HRI.

Christiane Moser presented the work from the Center for Human-Computer Interaction at fti…ReMiXeD speeddating event. This event was organized by the Bundesministerium für Verkehr, Technologie und Innovation (bmvit) together with Plansinn and hosted during this years BeSt – Die Messe Für Beruf, Studium und Weiterbildung.

More than 50 pupils from two school classes from the Neue Mittelschule Bergheim Salzburg and the Europa und Bundesgymnasium Salzburg-Nonntal participated in the speeddating with 6 researchers. The University of Salzburg was represented by Christiane Moser, Susanne Freingruber from the Urban Landscape Ecology, and Thomas Berger from the department chemistry and physics of materials. Additionally, Sandra Schön and Ferdinand von Tüllenburg participated from Salzburg Research, as well as Thomas Forte from the University of Applied Sciences in Salzburg.

Christiane Moser introduced the relevance of HCI in everyday life with examples related to the car, robotics, and school. Therefore, she brought a box with several research objects and engaged the pupils in an eight minutes brainstorming session.

Christiane Moser was invited by the Free University of Bozen (UNIBZ) for a two day seminar (October 12th and 13th) on “Game Design with Children“. The seminar started with a talk by Christiane Moser about her PHD on “Child-centered Game Development” that was also open for students and other faculty members. Afterwards, Prof. Gabriella Dodero, Prof. Rosella Gennari, Alessandra Melonio, and Santina Torello continued the seminar with an introduction of their work on the “GaCoCo Framework” and the two large studies they ran in the last years. They also showed their new makerspace lab that will open soon. Experiences and lessons learned were shared and intensively discussed, for example, the active engagement of children in the game design and development process, innovation by children, playful learning experiences, or the quality of products developed by children. This seminar formed the basis for future collaborations between the two research institutions.

Christiane Moser and Bernhard Maurer presented work from the Center for Human-Computer Interaction at CHI Play 2015, which took place in London, UK, from October 3rd to 7th and attracted around 200 attendees from all over the world.

Bernhard Maurer presented a paper on “Gaze-Based Onlooker Integration: Exploring the In-Between of Active Player and Passive Spectator in Co-Located Gaming“, which investigates the effects of different levels of onlooker input and their influence on the playing experience.

Christiane Moser participated in the Tool Design Jam: Designing tools for Games User Research and presented a poster on “Potentials of Gamification: Motivating Older Adults on a Support Exchange Platform”, which investigates how rewards can be used to support intrinsic motivation of older adults to support each other.

Thomas Meneweger from the Center for Human-Computer Interaction attended IEEE RO-MAN 2015, the 24th International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication. RO-MAN 2015 took place in Kobe, Japan, from August 31th to September 4th. This years’ conference theme was “Interaction with Socially Embedded Robots”.

Thomas gave a talk on “Working Together with Industrial Robots: Experiencing Robots in a Production Environment”. In his talk, Thomas presented the findings of a narrative interview study conducted with workers in a semi-conductor factory. Relying on workers’ reports of their personal experiences, we found that daily work with industrial robots can be described along the four themes: rivalry with the robots, adaption towards the robot’s behavior, perceived reasonability and knowledge acquisition. These findings indicate how human-robot cooperation can be improved in terms of enhancing workers’ everyday experiences with industrial robots, for example, by providing a feeling of control or emphasizing human competences.

Nicole Mirnig and Gerald Stollnberger attended the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems which took place in Hamburg, Germany, from September 28th to October 2nd.

The theme of this year’s IROS conference was “Gateway to the Era of Robots”, following the notion of Hamburg as Germany’s “Gateway to the World”. IROS is one of the major international conferences on robotics. This year, the conference featured 970 papers which were presented in 15 parallel tracks. There were 6 plenary and 9 keynote talks covering a wide spectrum of topics around robotics, for example, lessons learned from the robotics DARPA challenge, robotic governance, robot ethics, and nano robotics.

A total of 51 workshops and tutorials were held and an exhibition showcased both, current robotics projects in the EU and leaders in the robotics industry. Nicole co-organized a workshop together with her fellow-members from the EUrobotics topic group “Standardization“. The workshop “Towards Standardized Experiments in HRI“ was well-received. The full-day event featured 11 impulse talks and 7 poster contributions about different aspects of standardization which provided an excellent basis for the hands-on sessions. In these sessions, 30 experts with varying backgrounds discussed the requirements, challenges and the potential of standardized experiments that pave the way for measurable and comparable robotic systems and solutions.

During the conference exhibition, the latest Remote Medical Diagnostician (ReMeDi) robot prototype was presented. Gerald was actively involved at the ReMeDi booth and in doing so helped to present our project achievements to the research community.

From 22nd until 25th of September the AAL Forum 2015 took place in Ghent, Belgium. The event combines interactive sessions and workshops with an interesting exhibition area and attracts around 600 attendees from all over Europe every year. Its main purpose is to exhibit ICT solutions for older adults and to encourage networking and discussions upon new developments. During the forum exhibition, Katja Neureiter and Christiane Moser presented two AAL projects: ProMe and GeTVivid. ProMe seeks to provide meaningful opportunities for occupation in the life of older adults, in the transition from work to retirement and beyond. It allows professional intergenerational cooperation and mentoring via an online service platform, bringing together older adults with younger generations. GeTVivid supports older adults with mild impairments to manage their activities of daily living. It provides a support exchange system that allows to  offer/ask for support to/from others, who are living in geographical closeness, enables access to professional service providers (e.g., meals on wheels, shopping assistance, house-keeping), and offers support functions like reminders, news, or weather.

Additionally, in cooperation with the Austrian Institute of Technologies (AIT), Katja Neureiter and Markus Garschall organized a workshop that aimed at discussing successful approaches to communicate and transfer stakeholder needs in AAL projects. Overall 30 attendees with diverse backgrounds (e.g., research, industry, care, or funding agencies) participated in the workshop, sharing their experiences, best practices, failures, and lessons learned.