Abstract: WoBo (World in a Box) aims to provide a new experience for travellers, allowing them to visit distant or hardly reachable places through the exploitation of consumer cameras and a head mounted display. The experience consists in watching a 360-degrees video with 3D audio in a dedicated cabin. The user can select videos shot in different places, which have been created with six consumer cameras. We describe the proposed experience, the hardware and the software used for a first prototype.
Authors: S. Fibbi, F. Sorrentino, L. D. Spano, R. Scateni.
WoBo: Multisensorial travels through Oculus Rift.
CHI 2015 Interactivity, 299-302.
Seul, Corea del Sud, Aprile 2015.
Abstract: Navigation systems allow to discover cities and their urban areas easily and quickly, finding the shortest path to reach them and giving directions to users saving their time and energy. At present time, these systems are based over streets maps offered by the major mapping services like Tele Atlas, Navteq or OpenStreetMap. In recent years, thanks to the Google StreetView service it has been possible to discover main cities locations both indoor and outdoor. What is missing in this frame is the possibility to map small urban areas of small and medium sized cities, due to their lack of relevance for the big players. In this cities there could be very interesting areas for tourists. Example locations could be botanical gardens, archeological sites, protected natural areas among others. In this work we tried to set up a navigation system for limited extensions inside urban areas which permits to wander around and gives access to related information using augmented reality techniques. Due to the possible poor wireless coverage in these locations we designed an application that stores all required data on the user’s device, splitting the information in packages according to the chosen language. A key issue was to achieve good results combining all these features in a single device with a small display, overwhelming the constraints due to the mobile environment.
Abstract: We report on an alternative OCGM interface for a bulletin board, where a user can pin a note or a drawing, and actually shares contents. Exploiting direct and continuous manipulations, opposite to discrete gestures, to explore containers, the proposed interface supports a more natural and immediate interaction. It manages also the presence of different simultaneous users, allowing for the creation of local multimedia contents, the connection to social networks, providing a suitable working environment for cooperative and collaborative tasks in a multi-touch setup, such as touch-tables, interactive walls or multimedia boards.
Abstract: The wide availability of low-cost sensing devices is opening the possibility to easily create different interaction settings, which exploit various techniques for a more natural interaction, especially in public and shared settings. In this paper, we compared two different solutions for enhancing the interaction experience of a planetarium application, both replicable at a reasonable cost. The first version is based on a simple multitouch paradigm, while the second one exploits a full-body interaction together with a projection on geodetic sphere. We detail the technical implementation of both versions and, in addition, we discuss the results of user-study that compared the two modalities, which highlights a tradeoff between the control and the users’ involvement in the virtual environment.