The aim of the work reported here was to better understand the usability issues raised when digital libraries are used in a natural setting. The method used was a protocol analysis of users working on a task of their own choosing to retrieve documents from publicly available digital libraries. Various classes of usability difficulties were found. Here, we focus on use in context -that is, usability concerns that arise from the fact that libraries are accessed in particular ways, under technically and organisationally imposed constraints, and that use of any particular resource is discretionary. The concepts from an Interaction Framework, which provides support for reasoning about patterns of interaction between users and systems, are applied to understand interaction issues.

Wearable technology is widely used for collecting information about the human body and its movement by placing sensors on the body. This paper presents research into electronic textile strain sensors designed specifically for wearable applications which need to be lightweight, robust, and comfortable. In this paper, sixteen stretch sensors, each with different conductive stretch fabrics, are evaluated: EeonTex (Eeonyx Corporation), knitted silver-plated yarn, and knitted spun stainless steel yarn. The sensors’ performance is tested using a tensile tester while monitoring their resistance with a microcontroller. Each sensor was analyzed for its sensitivity, linearity, hysteresis, responsiveness, and fatigue through a series of dynamic and static tests. The findings show that for wearable applications a subset of the silver-plated yarn sensors had better ranked performance in terms of sensitivity, linearity, and steady state. EeonTex was found to be the most responsive, and the stainless steel yarn performed the worst, which may be due to the characteristics of the knit samples under test.

Extended Reality (XR) technology -such as virtual and augmented reality -is now widely used in Human Computer Interaction (HCI), social science and psychology experimentation. However, these experiments are predominantly deployed in-lab with a co-present researcher. Remote experiments, without co-present researchers, have not flourished, despite the success of remote approaches for non-XR investigations. This paper summarises findings from a 30-item survey of 46 XR researchers to understand perceived limitations and benefits of remote XR experimentation. Our thematic analysis identifies concerns common with non-XR remote research, such as participant recruitment, as well as XR-specific issues, including safety and hardware variability. We identify potential positive affordances of XR technology, including leveraging data collection functionalities builtin to HMDs (e.g. hand, gaze tracking) and the portability and reproducibility of an experimental setting. We suggest that XR technology could be conceptualised as an interactive technology and a capable data-collection device suited for remote experimentation. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Mixed / augmented reality; Virtual reality.

We introduce a novel experimental system to explore the role of vibrotactile haptic feedback in Virtual Reality (VR) to induce the self-motion illusion. Self-motion (also called vection) has been mostly studied through visual and auditory stimuli and a little is known how the illusion can be modulated by the addition of vibrotactile feedback. Our study focuses on whole-body haptic feedback in which the vibration is dynamically generated from the sound signal of the Virtual Environment (VE). We performed a preliminary study and found that audio and haptic modalities generally increase the intensity of vection over a visual only stimulus. We observe higher ratings of self-motion intensity when the vibrotactile stimulus is added to the virtual scene. We also analyzed data obtained with the igroup presence questionnaire (IPQ) which shows that haptic feedback has a general positive effect of presence in the virtual environment and a qualitative survey that revealed interesting and often overlooked aspects such as the implications of using a joystick to collect data in perception studies and in the concept of vection in relation to people's experience and cognitive interpretation of self-motion.

Live music-making using interactive systems is not completely amenable to traditional HCI evaluation metrics such as taskcompletion rates. In this paper we discuss quantitative and qualitative approaches which provide opportunities to evaluate the music-making interaction, accounting for aspects which cannot be directly measured or expressed numerically, yet which may be important for participants. We present case studies in the application of a qualitative method based on Discourse Analysis, and a quantitative method based on the Turing Test. We compare and contrast these methods with each other, and with other evaluation approaches used in the literature, and discuss factors affecting which evaluation methods are appropriate in a given context.