Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces Commons^™

The Impact Of Pre-Experiment Walking On Distance Perception In Vr, Soheil Sepahyar

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

While individuals can accurately estimate distances in the real world, this ability is often diminished in virtual reality (VR) simulations, hampering performance across training, entertainment, prototyping, and education domains. To assess distance judgments, the direct blind walking method—having participants walk blindfolded to targets—is frequently used. Typically, direct blind walking measurements are performed after an initial practice phase, where people become comfortable with walking while blindfolded. Surprisingly, little research has explored how such pre-experiment walking impacts subsequent VR distance judgments. Our initial investigation revealed increased pre-experiment blind walking reduced distance underestimations, underscoring the importance of detailing these preparatory procedures in research—details …

An Ambiguous Technique For Nonvisual Text Entry, Dylan C. Gaines

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Text entry is a common daily task for many people, but it can be a challenge for people with visual impairments when using virtual touchscreen keyboards that lack physical key boundaries. In this thesis, we investigate using a small number of gestures to select from groups of characters to remove most or all dependence on touch locations. We leverage a predictive language model to select the most likely characters from the selected groups once a user completes each word.

Using a preliminary interface with six groups of characters based on a Qwerty keyboard, we find that users are able to …

Towards Location-Independent Eyes-Free Text Entry, Dylan C. Gaines

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

We propose an interface for eyes-free text entry using an ambiguous technique and conduct a preliminary user study. We find that user are able to enter text at 19.09 words per minute (WPM) with a 2.08% character error rate (CER) after eight hours of practice. We explore ways to optimize the ambiguous groupings to reduce the number of disambiguation errors, both with and without familiarity constraints. We find that it is feasible to reduce the number of ambiguous groups from six to four. Finally, we explore a technique for presenting word suggestions to users using simultaneous audio feedback. We find …

Light Field Compression And Manipulation Via Residual Convolutional Neural Network, Eisa Hedayati

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Light field (LF) imaging has gained significant attention due to its recent success in microscopy, 3-dimensional (3D) displaying and rendering, augmented and virtual reality usage. Postprocessing of LF enables us to extract more information from a scene compared to traditional cameras. However, the use of LF is still a research novelty because of the current limitations in capturing high-resolution LF in all of its four dimensions. While researchers are actively improving methods of capturing high-resolution LF's, using simulation, it is possible to explore a high-quality captured LF's properties. The immediate concerns following the LF capture are its storage and processing …

Detecting Surface Interactions Via A Wearable Microphone To Improve Augmented Reality Text Entry, R. Habibi

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

This thesis investigates whether we can detect and distinguish between surface interaction events such as tapping or swiping using a wearable mic from a surface. Also, what are the advantages of new text entry methods such as tapping with two fingers simultaneously to enter capital letters and punctuation? For this purpose, we conducted a remote study to collect audio and video of three different ways people might interact with a surface. We also built a CNN classifier to detect taps. Our results show that we can detect and distinguish between surface interaction events such as tap or swipe via a …

A Critical Review Of Current Approaches And Practices In Computing Ethics Education, Sophia Farquhar

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Recent scandals caused by the results of negligent, malicious, or shortsighted software development practices highlight the need for software developers to consider the ethical implications of their work. Computing ethics has historically been a marginalized area within computing disciplines, so educators in these disciplines do not have a common background for teaching the topic. Computing ethics education, although often a required part of coursework, can vary widely in the method of implementation from university to university.

In this report I summarize the insights I gained from interviewing four educators from three different institutions on their pedagogical approaches to computing ethics. …

Investigating Midair Virtual Keyboard Input Using A Head Mounted Display, Jiban Krishna Adhikary

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Until recently text entry in virtual reality has been limited to using hand-held controllers. These techniques of text entry are feasible only for entering short texts like usernames and passwords. But recent improvements in virtual reality devices have paved the way to varied interactions in virtual environment and many of these tasks include annotation, text messaging, etc. These tasks require an effective way of text entry in virtual reality. We present an interactive midair text entry system in virtual reality which allows users to use their one or both hands as the means of entering text. Our system also allows …

Distance Perception In Virtual Environment Through Head-Mounted Displays, Bochao Li

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Head-mounted displays (HMDs) are popular and affordable wearable display devices which facilitate immersive and interactive viewing experience. Numerous studies have reported that people typically underestimate distances in HMDs.

This dissertation describes a series of research experiments that examined the influence of FOV and peripheral vision on distance perception in HMDs and attempts to provide useful information to HMD manufacturers and software developers to improve perceptual performance of HMD-based virtual environments.

This document is divided into two main parts. The first part describes two experiments that examined distance judgments in Oculus Rift HMDs. Unlike numerous studies found significant distance compression, our …

Improving Everyday Computing Tasks With Head-Mounted Displays, James Walker

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

The proliferation of consumer-affordable head-mounted displays (HMDs) has brought a rash of entertainment applications for this burgeoning technology, but relatively little research has been devoted to exploring its potential home and office productivity applications. Can the unique characteristics of HMDs be leveraged to improve users’ ability to perform everyday computing tasks? My work strives to explore this question.

One significant obstacle to using HMDs for everyday tasks is the fact that the real world is occluded while wearing them. Physical keyboards remain the most performant devices for text input, yet using a physical keyboard is difficult when the user can’t …

Musical Exercise For People With Visual Impairments, Ridwan Ahmed Khan

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

However, it is hard specifically for people with visual impairments to do exercise without proper guidance. They have accessibility issues and thus, without others ’ help, they cannot be sure if they are doing exercise in a consistent form. To address this problem, I have developed a Musical Exercise platform for people with visual impairments . With the help of audio feedback of Musical Exercise, people with visual impairments can perform exercises in a good form consistently. To assess usability of the system and compare different audio profiles of the system, I designed six different con ditions, including blindfolded or …

Personas: A Strategy For More Inclusive And Usable Reproductive Health Tracking Technologies, Anna R. Paul

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

In this report, I argue for the inclusion of personas in the development process of technologies that are designed to allow users to collect and track their health information. Personas provide a profile of a user and their needs, goals, and contexts. This tool can help designers to better understand their users, in order to create better, more usable end products. I examine one particular self-tracking technology, smartphone applications that allow users to record information about their menstrual cycles. Many of the most popular period tracking applications available today only meet the needs of a narrow user group, resulting in …

Extracting Flow Features Using Bag-Of-Features And Supervised Learning Techniques, Yifei Li

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Measuring the similarity between two streamlines is fundamental to many important flow data analysis and visualization tasks such as feature detection, pattern querying and streamline clustering. This dissertation presents a novel streamline similarity measure inspired by the bag-of-features concept from computer vision. Different from other streamline similarity measures, the proposed one considers both the distribution of and the distances among features along a streamline. The proposed measure is tested in two common tasks in vector field exploration: streamline similarity query and streamline clustering. Compared with a recent streamline similarity measure, the proposed measure allows users to see the interesting features …

Enabling Techniques For Expressive Flow Field Visualization And Exploration, Jun Tao

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Flow visualization plays an important role in many scientific and engineering disciplines such as climate modeling, turbulent combustion, and automobile design. The most common method for flow visualization is to display integral flow lines such as streamlines computed from particle tracing. Effective streamline visualization should capture flow patterns and display them with appropriate density, so that critical flow information can be visually acquired. In this dissertation, we present several approaches that facilitate expressive flow field visualization and exploration. First, we design a unified information-theoretic framework to model streamline selection and viewpoint selection as symmetric problems. Two interrelated information channels are …