Tiago Cardoso

This book contains the outcome of the 9th IFIP WG 5.5 International Summer Workshop on Multimodal Interfaces, eNTERFACE 2013, held in Lisbon, Portugal, in July/August 2013. The 9 papers included in this book represent the results of a 4-week workshop, where senior and junior researchers worked together on projects tackling new trends in human-machine interaction (HMI). The papers are organized in two topical sections. The first one presents different proposals focused on some fundamental issues regarding multimodal interactions, i.e., telepresence, speech synthesis and interactive modeling. The second is a set of development examples in key areas of HMI applications, i.e., education, entertainment and assistive technologies.

A Developmental Coordination Disorder can be identified when children show motor skills either below the expected levels considered adequate to their physical age or the opportunities provided for their learning. This problem affects four to six percent of school-age children, meaning that, from a very early stage of their life, they have several difficulties to adapt to the daily needs. In order to reduce the impact caused by this disorder, a team of therapists from “ – collected a wide range of exercises that allow the stimulus of several motor areas, including both the Gross and Fine Motor Skills. However, the application of this therapeutics is restricted to regular appointments. Since the motor stimulus, in order to be effective, need continuous application, it was found to be necessary to have a tool that in a practical and affordable way, fulfill this need. Therefore, the proposal presented in this article describes the creation of a systematic collection of such exercises in a friendly user manner for the children to be able to exercise elsewhere.

A importância do papel do Arquiteto-urbanista na caracterização dos conceitos e no planejamento das Smart Cities é um tema com muito por estudar e desenvolver. Este artigo faz uma aproximação a esta questão através de análise crítica com a seguinte abordagem: 1 - é feita uma descrição mais detalhada do porquê deste trabalho de investigação; 2 – apresenta-se uma contextualização da transição dos cenários; 3 - é levantada a problematização e a identificação de alguns motivos do “desenquadramento” da atuação do arquiteto-urbanista na cena; 4 – são discutidos aspectos e elencadas algumas características para “(re)enquadramento” dentro do cenário ideal, 5 – são analisados alguns casos de estudo; 6 - são tecidas conclusões. Este artigo mostra, portanto, o resultado deste estudo comparativo entre panorama atual e desejado, considerando este último como o cenário conceitual. É inicialmente caracterizada a situação atual através de levantamento da crítica especializada, depois é descrita a situação desejada tendo como base a análise de quatro casos de estudo; sendo dois de Smart Cities construídas a partir do zero e dois de cidade existentes que estão sendo transformadas em Smart Cities. Por fim, são identificados elementos que contribuem, na opinião dos autores, para o reassumir do papel do arquiteto-urbanista. Com este trabalho, foi possível, de uma forma sistematizada, estudar e suscitar ações deficitárias na atuação dos arquitetos-urbanistas, como também descortinar potenciais ações que podem induzir e reverter a transformação do cenário atual. Ficou claro que as necessidades intrínsecas ao novo modelo de cidade exigem ainda mais proposições criativas. O delinear das futuras cenas seria então ideal se os arquitetos-urbanistas retomassem posicionamento crítico propositivo e o utilizassem na solução que imagina novas e condizentes maneiras de habitar o espaço. O prelúdio já delineado convida então, os protagonistas na produção do espaço a alforriar-se da inércia, saindo da condição de espectadores e passando a condição de entendedores antecipados do cenário.

The design and development of a transparent, easy to use and affordable ICT infrastructure is a key pre-requisite for the effective large-scale implementation of the collaborative network organizations such as virtual organizations, professional virtual communities, e-science communities, etc. This chapter introduces an overview of the main classes of infrastructures required by different types of virtual organizations and summarizes the main approaches followed by a number of research projects in the area.

Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI) is a key topic on the Accessibility area, namely in what concerns a Smart-City environment, where humans have to interact with artefacts spread all around one particular city. In the last decade HCI has experienced a significant evolution towards a desired fully natural user interface, for example in what concerns the ability to recognize a wide range of hand gestures in real-time. Some efforts have lately been made in the hardware sector in order to deploy sensors that may gather information about the human body movements, as detailed as possible. One example of this effort is the Kinect Sensor from Microsoft. Nevertheless, although these solutions provide a solution for the body movement, they lack on the details, namely the hands, given their small dimension compared to the body as a whole. In other words, the SDKs provided by the vendors of these devices usually lack on the needed details concerning hand movements that would be needed for an accurate hand gesture recognition implementation. This paper presents an extension to the Kinect SDK based on a contour analysis for the estimation of the hand position. This algorithms are then used to provide the creation of a gesture library that might be used afterwards.

The society has organized itself towards facing existing social needs like the care for children with Down syndrome, Deafness or Autism Spectrum Disorders, among several other pathologies. As a result, several organizations emerged towards handling these issues, composed of doctors, therapists, psychologists, among other professionals, but excluding technology experts. On the other hand side, the finalist students from technology universities usually have a final course where they have to create a complete project from scratch. This article proposes a method for applying the effort and enthusiasm of such students in the above mentioned social causes through games’ development.

Nowadays there is a clear increase of products or tailored solutions with the goal of better adept to the needs of
clients. In another context there is a wide growth of computers’ presence in the class rooms, in order to assist
the teacher to captivate and motivate the students using educational games. However not all teachers have the
advanced computer knowledge that would allow them to personalize games, which would benefit children by
providing tailored solutions to their specific needs. Having this problem into consideration it was designed/idealized a system that relies on a framework of game creation that allows a user with less informatics skills to create a game based on a model. Although there are many games of this type it would be useful and innovative for a teacher to be able to create a game that is personalized to the students’ needs and according to the skills that they wish to develop. This system consists in an interface where the user has to follow some established steps, in order to achieve a file containing all the game features, which is later imported to
a framework. That system allows the creation of different games, as long as these games come under the same game mechanics.

An increasing number of our interactions are mediated through e-technologies. In order to enhance the human’s feeling of presence into these virtual environments, also known as telepresence, the individual is usually embodied into an avatar. The natural adaptation capabilities, underlain by the plasticity of the body schema, of the human being make a body ownership of the avatar possible, in which the user feels more like his/her virtual alter ego than himself/herself. However, this phenomenon only occurs under specific conditions. Two experiments are designed to study the human’s feeling and performance according to a scale of natural relationship between the participant and the avatar. In both experiments, the human-avatar interaction is carried out by a Natural User Interface (NUI) and the individual’s performance is assessed through a behavioural index, based on the concept of affordances, and a questionnaire of presence The first experiment shows that the feeling of telepresence and ownership seem to be greater when the avatar’s kinematics and proportions are close to those of the user. However, the efficiency to complete the task is higher for a more mechanical and stereotypical avatar. The second experiment shows that the manipulation of the viewpoint induces a similar difference across the sessions. Results are discussed in terms of the neurobehavioral processes underlying performance in virtual worlds, which seem to be based on ownership when the virtual artefact ensures a preservation of sensorimotor contingencies, and simple geometrical mapping when the conditions become more artificial.

The introduction of new courses on virtual organizations at the engineering education level is an important element for the broad acceptance of this new paradigm. This article summarizes the experience with an initiative of teaching Virtual Enterprises / Virtual Organizations subjects to Electrical and Computer Engineering students. The course structure, both in its lecture and lab work components, is described. Finally, some lessons learned with two editions of this course are presented.

Nowadays technology follows us everywhere. However, it is often overlooked when dealing with social issues, despite how easily it might improve the life of countless handicapped individuals. In other words, small pieces of software, under the form of games, can help the individual remain focus and go through treatments and therapies effortlessly. But game development is tricky because simply adopting a software development approach is not enough, as it assumes that games as a software can be developed through the commonly used systematic processes, yet these do have specific requirements. This paper proposes a new game development model to successfully deliver a quality serious game, towards social causes, bearing in mind the specific aspects both from games as a special kind of software and from the target players introducing a therapeutic/clinical perspective in the games development model.

— Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) faces a great challenges in what concerns the creation of a fully natural interface that is able to recognize a wide range of hand gestures in real-time. Lately efforts have been made by the research community catalyzed by the wide appearance of depth sensors such as the one from the Microsoft Kinect sensor. Nevertheless the available solutions struggle to robustly recognize hand gestures since, compared with the rest of the body, the hand is a small region with many joints, difficult to recognize and ultimately track. This paper proposes a hand shape recognition method that takes advantage of the depth sensor and the joint tracking ability of Microsoft Kinect sensor. The proposed method relies on the analysis of the hand contour or outline and compares it with previously stored templates achieving a good recognition ratio and proving it eligible
for real-time scenarios.

Virtual environments are an increasing trend in today’s society. In this scope, the avatar is the representation of the user in the virtual world. However, that relationship lacks empirical studies regarding the nature of the interaction between avatars and human beings. For that purpose it was studied how the avatar’s modeled morphology and dynamics affect its control by the user. An experiment was conducted to measure telepresence and ownership on participants who used a Kinect Natural User Interface (NUI). The body ownership of different avatars was assessed through a behavioral parameter, based on the concept of affordances, and a questionnaire of presence. The results show that the feelings of telepresence and ownership seem to be greater when the kinematics and the avatar’s proportions are closer to those of the user.