Social and Communicative Augmentations: Augmented Affordances for Virtual Social and Collaborative Interactions

Closed Human-Computer Interaction Bachelor Project No Affiliation

Background

VR allows to convincingly replicate human behaviors to avatars, virtual representations of users. Typically however, sensing mechanisms and replication are inferior to what can be expected from everyday interaction due to restricted space, mobility, or availability of sensing.

VR will certainly change the way we communicate. In multi-user environments, it can be beneficial to introduce abstractions of social behavior such as emotes in games or gestures evoked by buttons in social VR applications. This topic is not yet fully explored as we could imagine artificial affordances (such as emoticons in instant messengers) can be designed to construct novel languages and help users to automatically, semi-automatically, or manually transmit emotions and intententions and other communicative messages.

Such augmentations could for example increase the social connectedness or the sense of being present with others. Furthermore, they may be assistive to individuals with communicative deficits or social disorders, as well as to provide barrier free environemts or allow to fostor interculutral exchange.

In a former projects multiple prototypes for social augmentations have been developed, on which the project members can base upon. These include, for example, the augmentation of gaze (eye movements), the augmentation of nonverbal mimicry (mirroring other’s behavior), the utilization of brain-computer interfaces, as well as visual transformations and artificial substitutes for multi-user environments, see also:

• https://www.hci.uni-wuerzburg.de/projects/injectx/

Tasks

The Social Augmentations project will focus on the following tasks:

• Creating an design space and designing specific augmentations with respect to a modality of choice
• Extending the existing prototypes to support his augmentation (Unity 3D/C#/Python)
• Test and deploy the application
• Create and conduct a preliminary evaluation
• Create professional media material and an introduction for further projects

The project will be organized according to the basic principles of SCRUM, an agile project management method for software development. A group of 10 to 15 students will work as a team.

Prerequisites

• Introduction to Programming (Java, C++ or C#), e.g., 10-MCS-EinP
• Introduction to MCS, e.g., 06-MCS-GL-AP
• Statistics 1 and 2, e.g., 06-PSY-STAT-1 and 06-PSY-STAT-2
• Advanced Programming, e.g., 10-MCS-GADS, 10-MCS-EPP and 10-MCS-SPSE
• Usability and Software Ergonomics, e.g., 06-MCS-Usab
• Interactive Computer Graphics, e.g., 10-MCS-ICGV
• Game Engine Experience (Unity3D) (certain amount of team members)

Optional and beneficial

• Experience with machine learning (Support Vector Machines, Recurrent Networks)
• Experience with networking (Unity Networking/Unet)
• Experience with 3D Authoring software
• Experience with empirical methods
• Experience with interaction design

Cooperation

This project is in cooperation with the Fraunhofer IIS in Nuremberg.

Cooperation Partners

Contact Persons at the University Würzburg