0000000000211205
AUTHOR
Anna Spagnolli
Interweaving visual and audio-haptic augmented reality for urban exploration
While ordinary touchscreen-based interfaces on urban explorer applications draw much of a user's attention onto the screen, visual and audio-haptic augmented reality interfaces have emerged as the two main streams for enabling direct focus on the surroundings. However, neither interface alone satisfies users in the highly dynamic urban environment. This research investigates how the two complementary augmentation can coexist on one system and how people adapt to the situation by selecting the more suitable interface. A prototype was deployed in a field experiment in which participants explored points of interest in an urban environment with both interfaces. The engagement with the surroundi…
A two-step, user-centered approach to personalized tourist recommendations
Geo-localized, mobile applications can simplify a tourist visit, making the relevant Point of Interests more easily and promptly discernible to users. At the same time, such solutions must avoid creating unfitting or rigid user profiles that impoverish the users' options instead of refining them. Currently, user profiles in recommender systems rely on dimensions whose relevance to the user is more often presumed than empirically defined. To avoid this drawback, we build our recommendation system in a two-step process, where profile parameters are evaluated preliminarily and separately from the recommendations themselves. We describe this two-step evaluation process including an initial surv…
The VEPSY UPDATED Project: Clinical Rationale and Technical Approach.
More than 10 years ago, Tart (1990) described virtual reality (VR) as a technological model of consciousness offering intriguing possibilities for developing diagnostic, inductive, psychotherapeutic, and training techniques that can extend and supplement current ones. To exploit and understand this potential is the overall goal of the "Telemedicine and Portable Virtual Environment in Clinical Psychology"--VEPSY UPDATED--a European Community-funded research project (IST-2000-25323, www.cybertherapy.info). Particularly, its specific goal is the development of different PC-based virtual reality modules to be used in clinical assessment and treatment of social phobia, panic disorders, male sexu…