An Analysis of IHC and HCII Publication Titles: Revealing and Comparing the Topics of Interest of their Communities

Analyzing how the conferences of a given research field are evolving contributes to the academic community in that the researchers can better situate their research towards the advancement of knowledge in their area of expertise. Thus, in this work we present the results of a correlation analysis performed within and between-conferences of the field of Human-Computer Interaction, using data from the conference on Human-Computer Interaction International (HCII) and from the Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems (IHC). More than 209 thousand words from the titles of over 18 thousand publications from both conferences were analyzed in total, using different quantitative, qualitative and visualization methods, including statistical tests. The analysis of words from the tiles of publications from both conferences and the comparison of the ranking of these words indicate, amongst other results, that there is a significant difference in relation to the main and most covered topics for each one of these conferences.

Using Interviews to Evaluate Location-Based Games: Lessons and Challenges

Games User Research (GUR) is an interdisciplinary field of study that aims to measure, analyze, and understand the interaction and experience of players with digital games. Joining efforts to the advances in GUR, this work focuses on the evaluation of player interaction with Location-Based Games (LBGs), seeking to understand which aspects of this interaction can be explored through interviews and how researchers and practitioners have been using this method. We analyzed 23 studies that applied interviews to this end and conducted an expert opinion survey with the authors of these studies. As a result, we presented lessons and research challenges for the use of interviews in this type of evaluation, in hopes to encourage the conscious and systematic application of this method, in addition to guiding practitioners and researchers, especially beginners.

Player Experience Evaluation: Which instrument should I use?

The influences, metrics, and applications of User Experience (UX) have been investigated in various contexts and is acknowledged as a driving force to promote game development choices. Recently, there has been a growing interest and need to explore the experience in the context of digital games, which require particular forms of Player Experience (PX) components due to their interaction. These particularities of digital games bring some specific models, characteristics and evaluation methods based on this field. Therefore, both industry professionals and researchers must make informed choices when planning these assessments. This research aims to provide a brief panorama on how PX have been evaluated, and discuss its related concepts, based on the analysis 58 PX evaluation instruments. The data analysis provides a glance on the directions the research on PX evaluation is taking and indicates future research opportunities.

Design and Evaluation of a Mobile Application for an Educational Card Game

Educational games can provide players with rich learning and socializing experiences through different interac-tion paradigms, such as board games, card games, and, more recently, hybrid (physical-digital) games. However, the process of making, maintaining, and evolving an educational analog game is not a trivial task. Balancing the game mechanics and dynamics to provide a pleasant and educational gaming experience can be very difficult to achieve. Furthermore, adding a digital component in the gameplay can disturb the experience of the game and learning ob-jectives, and this kind of insertion should be evaluated. This work then aims to report the process of developing and evaluating a mobile application for helping the gameplay of a card game that focuses on on teaching software testing concepts. Our primary concern during the development of the application was whether its insertion would compromise the learning process or the social experience of the card game. The developed application has the fol-lowing functionalities: point counter, dice scrolling, timer, and a summary of the rules. We designed and developed a first version of the application. Then, we evaluated the impact of its insertion on gameplay by applying the game assisted with the application with students from Computer Science and Computer Engineering courses and, after the end of the game, the participants answered questionnaires about the players’ experience and their impressions about the application. Based on the results, we perceived that the use of the application provided benefits to the players’ experience, although the evaluation highlighted some opportunities for improvement. Thus, we evolve the mobile application based on the comments gathered in this evaluation. This new version has improvements on user’s interface, aiming to provide a better user experience, and new functionalities. Furthermore, we assessed the second version and compared both versions of the mobile app in order to collect evidence regarding improvements in the game experience.

Socially Aware Design of Games: an early workshop for game designers

Designing games to encourage players' positive and healthy behaviors is both a necessity and a challenge. Although the game research field has relevant contributions in literature, especially regarding gamification, serious games and persuasive computing, when the application domain is critical, such as education or health, it is necessary to understand the context in which a game will be inserted before actually proposing and designing it. This paper presents a collaborative workshop for problem understanding and requirements elicitation in the early stages of game design. The workshop stresses the importance of problem-understanding from a sociotechnical perspective before developing a game and before directly engaging other stakeholders. The paper presents the workshop in practice where designers must understand how to support children to perform speech therapy exercises outside hospital settings. The workshop was conducted to produce a systemic understanding of the problem domain, of human and technical aspects, possible solutions and their implications to be used as inputs for game design and evaluation. The paper presents the workshop and its main results, discussing lessons learned and highlighting the need for early and lean practices to promote the socially aware design of games.

A Framework Used for Analysis of User Experience in Games

The gaming industry has grown considerably in the last decades, designing experiences and interactive platforms through games, a popular culture entertainment medium. With the advancement of technologies and user experience design methods, a challenge is faced for the constant improvement of game characteristics aiming to improve pleasurability and immersion perceived by its users. To face this challenge, we designed a conceptual framework named GLIMPSE based on constructs used to evaluate user experiences with games. Its applicability was tested through a questionnaire that collected 241 valid responses from users of gaming forums and communities. An analysis was drawn to identify correlations between the data collected from the questionnaire, and its results revealed significant statistical data highlighting age and gender-wise differences from participants’ opinions.

Songverse: a music-loop authoring tool based on Virtual Reality

We can define Digital Musical Instruments (DMIs) as hardware-software solutions that are interactive and crafted to output sound according to users' input. DMIs are well known to unleash users' creativity but also to allow different and innovative experiences for the creation process, for example, smoothing the learning curve towards musical concepts such as rhythm and composition. On the other hand, Virtual Reality (VR) allows users to explore spatial interfaces in a natural and limitless way, which shows potential synergy towards the rise of new DMIs. In this paper, we introduce Songverse, an immersive DMI placed in a Virtual Reality scenario that allows users to create music by interacting with an environment designed to resemble the outer space. By adding systems, planets, and satellites to the virtual environment, the user can shape the produced sound through interactions that were extensively tested during the development phase. We then evaluated the instrument with musicians and non-musicians by interviewing and applying the System Usability Scale (SUS) to assess the easiness for people to create music using Songverse. As a result, users reported the use of the DMI as intuitive and easy to use, also highlighting the produced song as enjoyable.

Exploring Non-conventional Sensorimotor Devices in a Virtual Bicycle Simulator

This work presents SimBike, a virtual bicycle simulator that uses non-conventional motor, sensory and sensorimotor devices to provide greater user involvement and comfort. SimBike aims to recreate the activity of riding a bicycle by exploring possibilities of electronic devices, such as making curves with the handlebar or body-weight, pedaling, braking, among others. It also offers feedback commonly expected by the rider, such as wind sensation varying according to speed and the sensation of trepidation on uneven terrain. The simulator was evaluated with 16 users, obtaining positive results regarding user experience, comfort, and immersion. As future work, we propose to improve some features to adapt the simulator for all users, regardless of their weight and height.

An Autonomous Emotional Virtual Character: An Approach with Deep and Goal-Parameterized Reinforcement Learning

We have developed an autonomous virtual character guided by emotions. The agent is a virtual character who lives in a three-dimensional maze world. We found that emotion drivers can induce the behavior of a trained agent. Our approach is a case of goal parameterized reinforcement learning. Thus, we create conditioning between emotion drivers and a set of goals that determine the behavioral profile of a virtual character. We train agents who can randomly assume these goals while trying to maximize a reward function based on intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. A mapping between motivation and emotion was carried out. So, the agent learned a behavior profile as a training goal. The developed approach was integrated with the Advantage Actor-Critic (A3C) algorithm. Experiments showed that this approach produces behaviors consistent with the objectives given to agents, and has potential for the development of believable virtual characters.

MamuLEDs: Mixed Reality meets Mamulengo

Techniques of Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality (VR, AR, MR) have been used for puppet theater in different cultural contexts around the world. However, we are not yet aware of the use of these techniques in the Brazilian Northeast Popular Puppet Theater, a tradition known in Pernambuco as Mamulengo. We present here a system developed for “The Quarrel Between the Real Puppet and the Virtual Puppet,” a sketch created for the class Realidade Virtual e Aumentada of Computer Science program at CIn-UFPE. This paper aims to investigate how VR/AR/MR techniques can contribute to the creation of mamulengo shows. We used the method of qualitative case study, analyzing the audiovisual records of essays and presentation, the software solution developed in Unity 3D, and the data collected from a focus group interview with puppeteers. This study identified as weaknesses of our system: the hand tracking unreliability and the lack of tactile feedback, causing discomfort in experienced puppeteering professionals. As strengthens of the system, we found that the technology aroused interest because of its potential for expanding the options of tools available for popular puppetry shows creation in current times.