4th Augmented Human Conference for augmented reality, smart environments, cognition enhancement and wearable devices

The Fourth Augmented Human conference will be held in Germany.

The conference looks at new work in augmented reality and having a more seamless and productive interaction with devices.

There are finger worn input devices.

Finger-worn interfaces remain a vastly unexplored space for user interfaces, despite the fact that our fingers and hands are naturally used for referencing and interacting with the environment. In this paper we present design guidelines and implementation of a finger-worn I/O device, the EyeRing, which leverages the universal and natural gesture of pointing. We present use cases of EyeRing for both visually impaired and sighted people. We discuss initial reactions from visually im- paired users which suggest that EyeRing may indeed offer a more seamless solution for dealing with their immediate surroundings than the solutions they currently use. We also re- port on a user study that demonstrates how EyeRing reduces effort and disruption to a sighted user. We conclude that this highly promising form factor offers both audiences enhanced, seamless interaction with information related to objects in the environment.

Extending the screen to cover the entire forearm is promising. It allows the display to be worn similarly to a wristwatch while providing a large display surface. In this paper we present the design space of a display-augmented forearm, focusing on two specific properties of the forearm: its hybrid nature as a private and a public display surface and the way clothing influences information display. We show a wearable prototypical implementation along with interactions that instantiate the design space: sleeve-store, sleeve-zoom, public forearm display and interactive tattoo.

Exploration of user preferences of device-free interaction with smart appliances and services in the domestic environment. We presented a prototype system for on-surface gesture control to users in a natural environment and surveyed the perceived advantages of a potentially truly ubiquitous input method. Results show a positive attitude of users towards augmenting domestic environments with such a system. By reporting the most influencing user characteristics and our experience in designing the system we want to inform developers of future systems that support multiple input devices to better understand the role of device-free input in domestic spaces.

To help cope with information overload, recommendation engines direct users’ attention to content that is most relevant to them. We suggest that functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) brain measures can be used as an additional channel to information filtering systems. Using fNIRS, we acquire an implicit measure that correlates with user preference, thus avoiding the cognitive interruption that accompanies explicit preference ratings. We explore the use of fNIRS in information filtering systems by building and evaluating a brain-computer movie recommender. We find that our system recommends movies that are rated higher than in a control condition, improves recommendations with increased interaction with the system, and provides recommendations that are unique to each individual.

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