We present and explore the fruitfulness of “first-person cinematographic videogames,” a game model we have devised for the promotion of cultural, environmental, and territorial heritage. To support and foster the development of these type of games, we have developed a Web-based user-friendly authoring environment, extensively presented in the article. While employing standard first-person point-and-click game mechanics, the game model's distinctive feature is that the game environment is not based on a digital reconstruction (3D model) of the real-world settings but on cinematographic techniques combining videos and photos of existing places, integrating videoclips of mostly practical effects to obtain the interactivity typical of the first-person point-and-click adventure games. Our goal with such a game model is to mobilise mechanisms of engendering affection for real-world places when they become settings of the game world, arousing in the player forms of affection, attachment, and desire to visit them.

Research on enabling novice AR/VR developers has emphasized the need to lower the technical barriers to entry. This is often achieved by providing new authoring tools that provide simpler means to implement XR interactions through abstraction. However, novices are then bound by the ceiling of each tool and may not form the correct mental model of how interactions are implemented. We present XRSpotlight, a system that supports novices by curating a list of the XR interactions defined in a Unity scene and presenting them as rules in natural language. Our approach is based on a model abstraction that unifies existing XR toolkit implementations. Using our model, XRSpotlight can find incomplete specifications of interactions, suggest similar interactions, and copy-paste interactions from examples using different toolkits. We assess the validity of our model with professional VR developers and demonstrate that XRSpotlight helps novices understand how XR interactions are implemented in examples and apply this knowledge in their projects.

No abstract

This paper proposes a solution for supporting end users in configuring Virtual Reality environments by exploiting reusable templates created by experts. We identify the roles participating in the environment development and the means for delegating part of the behaviour definition to the end users. We focus in particular on enabling end users to define the environment behaviour. The solution exploits a taxonomy defining common virtual objects having high-level actions for specifying event-condition-action rules readable as natural language sentences. End users exploit such actions to define the environment behaviour. We report on a proof-of-concept implementation of the proposed approach, on its validation through two different case studies (virtual shop and museum), and on evaluating the approach with expert users.

PerDis has established itself as the leading venue for a focused, yet diverse, dynamic, and highly multidisciplinary research community in the field of pervasive displays. This annual event represents now a reliable place for researchers in different fields and areas to present and discuss their work, counting on comprehensive feedback from expert reviewers and attendees. Taking into account the basic values on which PerDis is founded, but also looking at a developing future, this year we introduced some changes. First, aiming at the enhancement of the reliability and neutrality of the review process, and thus at improving the overall quality of accepted papers, we introduced the double-blind review process. This choice required a big effort from all the organizing committee, and in particular from the program chairs and the program committee. We believe that it has resulted in an exciting, interesting, and high-quality program. We believe that this would also result in an improved quality of PerDis in the international landscape of scientific conferences and symposia. In addition to the usual adjunct tracks (demo, video, poster), this year we added a track which allowed the PerDis community to propose and organize co-located workshops and tutorials. This choice aims to offer more discussion and debate opportunities to the attendees. Lastly, we introduced a special discount for participants coming from the same institution, thus encouraging the participation for students along with their supervisors, who can both take advantage of their presence at the event. Our program is further complemented with two keynotes by world leading public display experts. In the first keynote, Prof. Dr. Alan Dix shares his experience on the usage of public displays even in small communities. In the second one, Prof. Dr. Alessio Malizia presents an analysis of 15 years of evolution in public displays from his expert point of view. We would like to thank all people who strongly contributed to the success of this year's edition of PerDis: our program chairs Jessica Cauchard and Vito Gentile, along with all members of the program committee, for having supervised a thorough review process and delivered a lot of high-quality reviews; our demo and video chairs Teresa Onorati and Bastian Pfleging; our poster chairs Jorge Goncalves and Mateusz Mikusz; our proceedings chairs Giuseppe Desolda and Uwe Grünefeld; our workshop and tutorial chairs Salvatore Andolina and Ville Mäkelä; our social media and publicity chair Passant Elagroudy and our web chair Sarah Prange. We hope you enjoy the PerDis 2019 program, and that you enjoy your stay in Palermo while attending the symposium.