While the Human-Robot Interaction R&D community produces great amounts of scientific outputs on aspects such as efficacy, effectiveness, user satisfaction, emotional impact and social components, the results are scattered in a myriad of different approaches and ways of performing and testing interaction. In consequence, results are not comparable and benchmarking of the various approaches proposed is hardly possible. The community is still missing consensus tools to benchmark robot products and robot applications, although both, robot producers (industry view-point) as well as the robot research community (academic view-point) would profit much from such tools. Modes are required for the standardized assessment of robot products and applications in use in terms of safety, performance, user experience, and ergonomics. The benefit of agreed approaches and methods to assess robots and the interaction with them, is the production of comparable data. In the standardization community, such data is labeled “normative”. This means that it has been formulated via wide consultation in an open and transparent manner. In this way, the results become widely acceptable, and can be exploited for the creation of international quality norms and standards, which in turn would mean measurable robot performances in terms of HRI.

Experts from academia and the industry, as well as standardization experts have joined and launched the euRobotics AISBL topic group “Standardization”. The group strives to develop standardized HRI experiments. Such experiments will allow the community to assess robotic solutions and compare data over different projects. Some of the topics the group is working on are safety, performance, user experience, and modularity of robots and robotic components. The group has organized several workshops on standardized HRI experiments, all of which were well-received by the many participants who attended the respective events.

The next upcoming event organized by the topic group is the workshop “Towards Standardized Experiments in Human-Robot Interaction” at this year’s IROS conference in Hamburg, Germany on September 28, 2015. The topic group members invite interested parties to participate and contribute and in doing so help tackling HRI as a horizontal topic across all robotic domains. For more information refer to the workshop website.

From August 24th to 29th, Nicole Mirnig, Susanne Stadler and Gerald Stollnberger attended a summer school on robotics at the Akademie der Automatisierungstechnik in Vienna. The one-week event was organized by F-AR Förderung der Automation und Robotik and Centauro – Center of Competence in Automation in Robotics.

The summer school was open for interested roboticists worldwide to take part in a week long training in industrial robotics. The goal of the school was to provide participants with hands-on laboratory experience, programming and offline simulation skills and to give an introduction to novel technologies and trends in the area of industrial robotics. The hands-on sessions provided the opportunity to gain practical skills with industrial robots from ABB and Fanuc in small, collaborative teams. The summer school was closed with an excursion to Magna Interiors in Ebergassing (Lower Austria) where the participants could see industrial robots in action.

Christiane Moser was invited to hold a two day workshop at Ubisoft Blue Byte, which took place on August 13th and 14th. From Bluebyte Mainz and Düsseldorf 35 participants from the Game Design, Art, and Coding Department, as well as Management und Producing defeated the heat and vividly participated in discussions throughout the two days.

The workshop focused on User Experience (UX) and Interaction Design (IxD) in Video Games from the perspective of HCI and game research. The main goals were 1) to build up a basic understanding of the human, the computer, and the interaction as well as the way they influence each other, and 2) to introduce user-centered design approaches and how they can be included into their daily activities of game design.

Additionally in the evening of the first day, a Game Idea Jam on the topic of ‘CrossMedia Games’ was organized and 13 participants could already try out some user-centered design approaches, in order to brainstorm game ideas and build a low-fidelity prototype.

Monday, July 27th, 2015, 5pm

Assoc.-Prof. Lennart Nacke: From Body Signals To Brainy Player Insights

Games User Researchers are often sceptical when it comes to using brain and body sensors, but as the cost of sensor technologies continues to drop, it is time to consider the potential insights that we might gain from using these signals in our work. In this talk, I will briefly introduce the most common physiologi-cal measures that are used in Games User Research, and discuss the challenges in obtaining a clean signal and usable data from different low-cost devices. Additionally, I will make recommendations for signal cleaning procedures and briefly talk about the analysis made possible with different physiological sensors. I will also demonstrate the conclusions that may be inferred from some of these data when compared to other Games User Research methods, such as behavioural observation. Lastly, I will introduce some of my own visualization methods for quickly comprehending the meaning of physiological sensor data.

At IDC 2015, Christiane Moser presented work from the Center for Human-Computer Interaction. IDC 2015 took place in Boston, USA, from June 21st to 24th, and attracted around 150 attendees from all over the world.

Christiane Moser presented a short paper as poster on “Physics-based Gaming: Exploring Touch vs. Mid-Air Gesture Input” that was co-authored by Manfred Tscheligi. In a user study with 20 children aged 11 to 14 years, they investigated the differences in player experience when playing Cut the Rope on the tablet with touch gestures and on the computer with mid-air gestures using a Leap Motion. The quantitative data from the questionnaire revealed no substantial differences regarding the player experience, which might be due to the novelty effect of the Leap Motion mid-air gestures. However, the observations indicated several problems of accuracy and orientation when playing the game with mid-air gestures. This is due to the lack of hardware-based physical feedback when interacting with the Leap Motion and results in a different affordance that has to be considered in future physics-based game design using mid-air gestures.

Monday, June 16th, 2015, 6pm

Prof. Ben Schouten: Playful Empowerment

“All play means something”, that is what Huizinga said (Homo Ludens). It can turn an everyday practice into a special experience that can gather us around a common goal or theme. You can encounter that experience in everyday live, whether it concerns your health or your education, in politics and even science. More often elements of play and serious games are used to seduce, motivate, learn or persuade. That is a positive and encouraging development. However, who decides upon the rules? And are there losers next to the winners?
In this talk I will elaborate on the qualities of play in relationship to what we like to call civic interaction design. I will show how designers together with citizens can use play and other civic media to enhance livability in modern city life and how this changes the relationships between citizens, designers and public institutions. By doing so new societal challenges arise, emerging from the use of games and other playful elements in our media saturated world that go beyond the ‘magic circle’ of play.

Prof. Panos Markopoulos: Head Up Games

„The games of tomorrow should look more like the games of the past”. With this slogan, we developed a genre of games that we termed Head Up Games, as games that try to recreate traditional play patterns, and to restore some of the benefits that play has been touted to have. We present the original ambition, a range of games developed, empirical evidence regarding the quality of the games, and design challenges in making this game. The presentation will end with some open challenges for the future of head-up games, and for design methods for working with children.

At TVX 2015, Christiane Moser presented work from the Center for Human-Computer Interaction. TVX 2015 took place in Brussels, Belgium, from June 3rd to 5th, and attracted around 200 attendees from all over the world.

Christiane Moser, Thomas Kargl, and Manfred Tscheligi co-organized a workshop together with Jeroen Vanattenhoven from CUO at KU Leuven, Lilia Perez Romero form CWI (Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica), Fabian Schiller from the Institut für Rundfunktechnik GmbH, Joost negenman from a Dutch Public Broadcaster, and Isha Dandavate, Jennifer Milam, and Jeanne Allen from YouTube a workshop on “People, Context, and Devices: Defining the New Landscape of TV Experiences”.

Furthermore, Christiane Moser presented the GeTVivid platform onbehalf of her colleagues Thomas Kargl, Manfred Tscheligi, Bernhard Feldbacher and Bernhard Collini-Nocker from the University of Salzburg, Matteo Harutunian and Fabian Schiller from the he Institut für Rundfunktechnik GmbH, Michael Eitelberg and Nasser Altaani from Evision GmbH, Manuel Eisele and Philipp Osl from the University of St. Gallen.

We are co-organizing a workshop at TVX 2015:

People, Context, and Devices: Defining the New Landscape of TV Experiences

In conjunction with TVX 2015.

Modern technologies (e.g., tablet, smartphone, large public displays) remove many of the constraints that define the scope of what television is or can be, but we often define it based upon our prior TV experiences with broadcast and cable television. This one-day workshop at TVX 2015 will address design challenges and opportunities (e.g., of video streams, social TV apps, second screens) in order to consolidate existing knowledge to describe the changing landscape of TV experiences. It’s time to redefine what we think of when we say “television” and this workshop will engage participants in that process.

This workshop aims at exploring the changing landscape of the television experience. We will explore the impact of devices, context, and social interactions on users’ television watching behaviors. The day will be divided into two portions led by different organizations:

1. Members of the University of Salzburg and KU Leuven, in collaboration with three industry practitioners, will lead a discussion about lessons learned through practice or research and best practices.
2. Members of the YouTube User Experience team will lead an interactive working session to enumerate and characterize key facets of the developing landscape of TV experiences, culminating in the creation of a framework that will inform and foster innovation.

This workshop is for academics and professionals who have experience in TV UX. It encourages interdisciplinary discussions and aims to include researchers and practitioners in the fields of content creation, interaction design, user interface design, computer science, psychology, cognitive science, and sociology, etc. Through this two-part workshop, we aim to bring together experts to discuss lessons from previous work and articulate and challenge existing assumptions.

For further information, please visit: https://projects.icts.sbg.ac.at/tvx2015/