We examined whether spatial representations for scenes experienced on the screens of mobile devices are orientation dependent and whether the type of movement (physical vs. simulated) during learning affects the encoding and the retrieval of spatial information. Participants studied a spatial layout depicted on a tablet and then carried out perspective-taking trials in which they localized objects from imagined perspectives. Depending on condition, participants either rotated the tablet along with their body or remained stationary and swiped with their finger on the screen to change their viewpoint within the scene. Results showed that participants were faster and more accurate to point to objects from an imagined perspective that was aligned than misaligned to their initial physical orientation during learning, suggesting that they had formed an orientation-dependent representation. Although no differences were found between movement conditions during pointing, participants were faster to encode spatial information with physical than simulated movement.

No abstract

Public displays are some of the most challenging interfaces to design because of two key characteristics. First, the experience should be engaging, to attract and maintain users' attention. Second, the interaction with the display should be natural, meaning that users should be able to receive the desired output with little or no training. Holographic displays are increasingly popular in public spaces such as museums and concert halls but there is little published research on users' experiences with such displays. Previous research has suggested both tangible and intangible inputs as engaging and natural options for holographic displays, but there is no conclusive evidence on their relative merits. Hence, we run a study to investigate the user experience with a holographic display comparing the level of engagement and feeling of natural experience in the interacting process. We used a mix of surveys, interviews, video recordings, and task-based metrics to measure users' performance on a specific task, the perceived usability, and levels of engagement and satisfaction. Our findings suggest that a tangible input was reported as more natural than the intangible one, however, both tangible and intangible inputs were found to be equally engaging. The latter findings contribute to the efforts of designing intangible public holographic displays and other interactive systems that take into consideration health safety issues, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic era in which contamination can be established with tangible and physical interaction between users and public displays, yet without affecting the level of engagement compared to the tangible experience.

Peripersonal space (PPS) refers to the space around us that lies within reach, in which most of our interactions with the environment occur. However, the PPS is not a static bubble surrounding our body. Rather, it can be dynamically reshaped in size, for instance as a consequence of the use of tools extending the arm’s reach. Here we employed a visuo-tactile detection task in an immersive VR environment to measure the size of participants’ PPS before and after different kinds of tool training. A short training period in which participants pulled objects from the Extrapersonal space (EPS) towards themselves via a tool was effective in enlarging the PPS, a result that nicely complements previous studies carried out in real life studies. However, no significant change in PPS size was achieved via training with other motor routines such as pulling, hammering or shooting, each of which involving a different kind of interaction between the agent and the targets. Taken together, our results suggest that the reshaping of the PPS is a complex phenomenon in which the kind of motor routines exploited to interact with the surrounding objects, plays a critical role.