Towards Augmented Reality Driven Human-City Interaction: Current Research on Mobile Headsets and Future Challenges

Interaction design for Augmented Reality (AR) is gaining attention from both academia and industry. This survey discusses 260 articles (68.8% of articles published between 2015–2019) to review the field of human interaction in connected cities with emphasis on augmented reality-driven interaction. We provide an overview of Human-City Interaction and related technological approaches, followed by reviewing the latest trends of information visualization, constrained interfaces, and embodied interaction for AR headsets. We highlight under-explored issues in interface design and input techniques that warrant further research and conjecture that AR with complementary Conversational User Interfaces (CUIs) is a crucial enabler for ubiquitous interaction with immersive systems in smart cities. Our work helps researchers understand the current potential and future needs of AR in Human-City Interaction.

Making Community Beliefs and Capacities Visible Through Care-mongering During COVID-19

The COVID-19 global pandemic brought forth wide-ranging, unanticipated changes in human interaction, as communities rushed to slow the spread of the coronavirus. In response, local geographic community members created grassroots care-mongering groups on social media to facilitate acts of kindness, otherwise known as care-mongering. In this paper, we are interested in understanding the types of care-mongering that take place and how such care-mongering might contribute to community collective efficacy (CCE) and community resilience during a long-haul global pandemic. We conducted a content analysis of a care-mongering group on Facebook to understand how local community members innovated and developed care-mongering practices online. We observed three facets of care-mongering: showing appreciation for helpers, coming up with ways of supporting one another's needs, and continuing social interactions online and present design recommendations for further augmenting care-mongering practices for local disaster relief in online groups.

Blockchain to improve security, knowledge and collaboration inter- agent communication over restrict domains of the internet infrastructure, with human interaction

This paper describes the development and implementation of a blockchain to improve security, knowledge and intel ligence during the communication and col laboration processes between agents under restricted Internet Infrastructure domains. It is a work that proposes the application of a blockchain, independent of platform, in a particular model of agents, but that can be used in similar proposals, since the results in the specific model were satisfactory. Additional ly, the model al lows interaction and, also, col laboration between humans and agents.

TO THE QUESTION OF SPEECH BEHAVIOR

A person, being by nature a social being, cannot live out of touch with other people: he must consult, share thoughts, feelings, empathize, seek understanding, etc. Communication is the channel of communication with other people. Communication is a complex process of human interaction. The representatives of various sciences: philosophers, psychologists, linguists, sociologists, cultural scientists, etc. deal with the problem of communication. According to scientists, two-thirds of human communication consists of speech. Linguists study the processes of speech formation and its perception; communicative attitudes; factors that make communication difficult and increase its effectiveness, etc.

Being in a crowd bonds people via physiological synchrony

Collective events can generate intense emotions, shape group identities, and forge strong bonds. Do these effects extend to remote participation, and what are the psychological mechanisms underpinning their social power? We monitored psycho-physiological activity among groups of basketball fans who either attended games in-person (in a stadium) or watched games live on television in small groups. In-person attendance was associated with greater synchronicity in autonomic nervous system activation at the group level, which resulted in more transformative experiences and contributed to stronger identity fusion. Our findings suggest that the social effects of sports depend substantially on the inter-personal dynamics unfolding among fans, rather than being prompted simply by watching the game itself. Given the increasing prevalence of virtual experiences, this has potentially wide-reaching implications for many domains of collective human interaction.

Social Interaction With Agents and Avatars in Immersive Virtual Environments: A Survey

Immersive virtual reality technologies are used in a wide range of fields such as training, education, health, and research. Many of these applications include virtual humans that are classified into avatars and agents. An overview of the applications and the advantages of immersive virtual reality and virtual humans is presented in this survey, as well as the basic concepts and terminology. To be effective, many virtual reality applications require that the users perceive and react socially to the virtual humans in a realistic manner. Numerous studies show that people can react socially to virtual humans; however, this is not always the case. This survey provides an overview of the main findings regarding the factors affecting the social interaction with virtual humans within immersive virtual environments. Finally, this survey highlights the need for further research that can lead to a better understanding of human–virtual human interaction.

Book Review: “Playing With My Dog Katie. An Ethnomethodological Study of Dog – Human Interaction.” by David Goode. Purdue University Press, 2007, pp. 228

The book by David Goode gives us a possibility to take an extraordinary excursion to unremarkable and inscrutable world, so common for us that we do not usually notice it, although we participate in it everyday. It is a reconstructed world that shows us methods that we use in mundane life to establish an order in it and to live with others going through concrete situations. Our live consists of just these situations that we live by (as playing with a dog, talking with others, lining up the store, etc.) and not of socio – demographic data from the end of sociological questionnaires and of many other abstractions used by sociologists. What is observable and analisable not always becomes a topic of the sociological research. Ethnomethodology, a perspective used in the book, wants just to go into details and to extract them to the surface. We should not rest our analysis on the “shadows” of reality, that are cast by still available and analyzable empirical phenomena, although difficult to analyze because of sociological methods and common sense perception used by sociologists.

Charity and grace

This essay attempts to reconcile charity with grace, the central concepts of two thinkers whose views may seem irreconcilable to many: Donald Davidson, an analytical philosopher and the most distinguished follower of Quine; and Julian Pitt-Rivers, an Europeanist anthropologist, who wrote at length on Spain and Southern France. The latter's historicist exegesis of gracia points to basic aspects of human experience that are also salient in the reduction to basics that Davidson carried out concerning interpretation and truth. For Davidson, in the face of ultimate indeterminacy, interpretation is made possible due to the rational accommodation that charity sparks off. For Pitt-Rivers, gratuity highlights how processes of personal interaction depend on the drawing of shared trajectories: that is, not only do I have to grant others charity to make sense of them, I also have to frame others as subjects with a future by relation to myself as already in existence. The paper proposes that human interaction involves processes of sensemaking that integrate shared intentionality (i.e. the credit with which we respond to the indeterminacy of meaning) with shared experience (i.e. the debt implicit in the ultimate underdetermination of the world's entities). Thus, it brings both concepts together under the label of charis, their common etymological root, suggesting that the dynamic it represents is a broader feature of life itself.

In Grenada, West Indies, What Is the Degree of Bat-human Interaction in Households and Is It Associated to Arboviral Disease?

Background: Bats are reservoirs for several zoonotic pathogens, making human-bat interactions particularly concerning. Recent studies documented that Grenadian bats can be infected with Zika, dengue and Chikungunya viruses and Leptospira bacteria among other pathogens. The objective of this study was to estimate the number of homes in Grenada that have a bat infestation, and to determine whether there is a correlation between the number of bat infested homes with the type of roofing or the presence of arbovirus infections of human inhabitants. Methods: An institutional review board (IRB) approved questionnaire delivered through a semi-structured interview was administered at the central bus stop in St. George, Grenada to recruit participants from all six parishes and the island of Carriacou. Results determined the percentage of individuals that had bat roosts in their households, whether this was of concern to them, whether they had taken any steps to keep bats out of their residence, and whether they had confirmed or suspected cases of dengue, Zika or Chikungunya virus infections. Information on the type of roofing and presence of window screens were also documented. Bat type (fruit vs insect eating bats) was attempted by guano description. Results: Results from 210 individual responses provided data showing all six parishes were represented although not equally. Having bats at the household was not associated with parish of residence, roof type or presence or absence of window screens. The results showed 60% of homes in Grenada are bat-infested and 51% of people self-reported recent arbovirus infection; but no correlation between the two. Also, no correlation to a specific type of roof or type of bat was found.Conclusions: A statistically significant number of inhabitants had attempted to remove bats from their homes, indicating that bats are perceived as pest to homes in Grenada, and justifying further research into relocating bats through the use of construction changes, awareness, and the creation of bat houses.

Coordination dynamics of multi-agent interaction in a musical ensemble

Humans interact with other humans at a variety of timescales and in a variety of social contexts. We exhibit patterns of coordination that may differ depending on whether we are genuinely interacting as part of a coordinated group of individuals vs merely co-existing within the same physical space. Moreover, the local coordination dynamics of an interacting pair of individuals in an otherwise non-interacting group may spread, propagating change in the global coordination dynamics and interaction of an entire crowd. Dynamical systems analyses, such as Recurrence Quantification Analysis (RQA), can shed light on some of the underlying coordination dynamics of multi-agent human interaction. We used RQA to examine the coordination dynamics of a performance of “Welcome to the Imagination World”, composed for wind orchestra. This performance enacts a real-life simulation of the transition from uncoordinated, non-interacting individuals to a coordinated, interacting multi-agent group. Unlike previous studies of social interaction in musical performance which rely on different aspects of video and/or acoustic data recorded from each individual, this project analyzes group-level coordination patterns solely from the group-level acoustic data of an audio recording of the performance. Recurrence and stability measures extracted from the audio recording increased when musicians coordinated as an interacting group. Variability in these measures also increased, indicating that the interacting ensemble of musicians were able to explore a greater variety of behavior than when they performed as non-interacting individuals. As an orchestrated (non-emergent) example of coordination, we believe these analyses provide an indication of approximate expected distributions for recurrence patterns that may be measurable before and after truly emergent coordination.