Jun HU :: HU, Jun

Gaze has important social meanings in face-to-face communication. A sighted person often uses various eye gestures to convey nonverbal information that a blind conversation partner cannot access and respond. In many examples, the eyes of blind people seem unattractive, and often with deformities, which make the eye appearances less appealing to sighted people. These factors influence the smooth communication between blind and sighted people.

Our research is to simulate the gaze for blind people, aiming at improving the quality of face-to-face communication between blind and sighted people. In this dissertation, the purpose of simulating the gaze includes two aspects: to assist blind people to perceive the gaze from the sighted and to simulate the appropriate gaze for blind people as a visual reaction.

PhD Thesis by Bin Yu

Mainly provoked by increasing stress-related health problems and driven by recent technological advances in human-computer interaction (HCI), the ubiquitous physiologically-relevant information will potentially transform the role of biofeedback from clinical treatment to a readily available tool for personal stress management. The primary motivation for this thesis is to bring biofeedback
techniques closer to everyday use so that the average people can harness it more intuitively, effortlessly and comfortably.

PhD thesis by Wan Jou She

Previous bereavement-related literature indicated that around one out of ten (9.8%) bereaved individuals could suffer from a more severe and protracted grief, entitled Persistent Complex Bereavement Disorder (PCBD) in the DSM-V, or Prolonged Grief Disorder (PGD) in ICD-11. To precisely differentiate the prolonged grievers from the normal grievers, a minimum six months is required, and to offer psychotherapeutic intervention to normal grievers indifferently could instead hamper their natural coping mechanism. The fact conicts with the fact that the severely maladapted grievers might need psychotherapeutic support in a more timely manner, and might even benefit from earlier intervention. This dilemma indicates that there is a need for a screening method in the first six months of bereavement.

Based on the above discussion, the objective of the thesis is to develop a screening method for prolonged grief disorder that is empirically tested and can be embedded in an internet-based
application.

PhD Thesis by Chao Wang

The road environment can be seen as a social situation: In each journey, we encounter other drivers and need to coordinate with them to share the infrastructure. A traditional physical communication method, such as car-body language, lights, horn and speed are the most frequently used means to exchange information, limiting both the range and the bandwidth of the connectivity. This situation may lead to two adverse effects: more conflict in sharing the road and social isolation while driving.

Nowadays, everywhere available connectivity, the broad penetration of social network services and the increasing utility of advanced humanmachine interaction technology, provide new possibilities for enhancing the communication between drivers on the road, enabling social information to pass through the steel shell of the cars without the physical restriction. In this research, we generated, prototyped and evaluated multiple novel social applications …

PhD Thesis by Kadian Davis

…This dissertation employs a user-centered design approach within a multidisciplinary framework, which includes aspects of human-computer interaction, social psychology, cognition, signal processing, and pervasive computing for the design, development, deployment, and validation of bidirectional activity peripheral displays to support social connectedness. Throughout this dissertation, we exploit a human-centered approach to actively involve impending ageing and caregiver users in our design, development, and validation process. Traditional ethnographic techniques such as interviews and observation, accompanied by contemporary techniques such as co-constructing stories were applied to acquire a holistic understanding of the users in context and assist prospective users to imagine user requirements and envision future usage possibilities within AAL environments…

PhD Thesis by Yu Zhang

Background: Since the early pioneers like Le Corbusier in collaboration with the Philips Corporation designed Poème électronique in 1958, practitioners including designers and artists have embraced interaction and interactive technologies as means for expressing their intuitive concepts. Consequently, designing the experience for interactive art products and installations has gained attraction worldwide over the last decades. Any innovative design is strongly influenced by the intent of the practitioner. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to understand how those practitioners’ intent can be made explicit through their designed artifacts.

Read more…

PhD Thesis by Maira Brandao Carvalho

Digital Serious Games (SGs) are gaining increasing importance as educational and training tools. However, there is still a long way to make them widely deployed. On the one hand, balancing fun and educational elements in a SG is not trivial and requires understanding how these games can be designed to support effective and efficient learning. On the other hand, actual development can be costly and time-consuming, involving large teams of people from different backgrounds, who often do not share common vocabularies and work processes.

The objective of this research is, thus, to support the design and development of digital educational SGs, by helping reduce the costs associated with SG development, while fulfilling the game’s educational and entertainment goals…

PhD thesis, by Marija Nakevska

Immersive and interactive Storytelling is a form of digital entertainment in which an actual narrative is recreated into highly immersive and interactive fictional worlds where a user can have the experience of being a character in a story that unfolds based on her actions. We take advantage of novel technologies, by merging real and virtual worlds to produce new environments that confront the user in an intense and a seemingly real experience. The user is physically immersed in the narrative, co-creates the story, and interacts with the space instead of watching on a screen.

Read more…

by Bram van der Vlist

This thesis approaches the issue of interoperability between devices and services in thehome f rom a design perspective. It builds on the fundamental idea of ubiquitous computing; that the majority of our products and devices will be able to interconnect and interoperate. This tenet faces designers with a challenge: to create meaningful interactions for users to deal with the complexity of the ecosystem of interoperating devices they function in.

When moving away from interaction with a single product towards interaction with a system of products, designers need to nd ways to communicate the relationships between the products and the larger system they are part of. Additionally, designers are challenged to communicate the possibilities of new, emergent functionalities, that emerge when products are being interconnected. This paradigm shift changes the way action and function are coupled and spatially distributes user interaction.

Read more…

by Gerrit Niezen.

The thesis describes the design and development of an ontology and software framework to support user interaction in
ubiquitous computing scenarios. The key goal of ubiquitous
computing is “serendipitous interoperability”, where devices
that were not necessarily designed to work together should be
able to discover each other’s functionality and be able to make
use of it. Future ubiquitous computing scenarios involve hundreds of devices. Therefore, anticipating all the different types
of devices and usage scenarios a priori is an unmanageable
task.

Read more…