Revista Romana de Interactiune Om-Calculator

1-16

Authors: Felix Hamza-Lup, Elizabeth Murrell, James LaPlant, William Baird, Dorin-Mircea Popovici

3D simulations augment the presentation of abstract concepts by enhancing our understanding. However, most simulations only make use of two of our five senses: sight and hearing. If we employ additional sensory communication channels in these simulations, we may gain a deeper understanding of illustrated concepts by increasing the communication bandwidth and providing alternative perspectives. We present the implementation of the sense of touch in 3D simulations for teaching important concepts from introductory physics. Specifically, we have developed a visuo-haptic simulator that illustrates friction. We hypothesize that interactive 3D haptic simulations are useful for engaging students in subject study and allowing them to put into context the material presented.

33-52

Authors: Sabin-Corneliu Buraga, Alexandru Angelescu, Petrica Manoila

This article is presenting the multiple relationships that could be established between users and electronic games. The paper presents several considerations regarding the main characteristics and the roles of human factor in the context of entertainment applications. We mainly refer to the design of most important game types. Our research includes an original case study – the development of a combative game deployed on the XNA platform –, developed on the basis of discussed aspects and certain interaction design patterns.

65-79

Authors: Marian Padure

The interaction between the visually impaired user and the assistive technology offered the possibility to structure a new professional and educational approach, very much in conformity with the present social system's requirements. Nonetheless, we must take into consideration also the personality traits involved in this interaction and the changes that occur consequently to this interaction. In this article, we wanted to present a synthesis of the research already undertaken at a national level in the past few years and also to present the main conclusions from a technical, occupational and educational perspective, along with future research paths in the field of the interaction between the visually impaired user and the assistive technologies, which impose themselves on medium and long term in our country.

89-104

Authors: Ana Maria Marhan

This paper discusses some of the theoretical and methodological challenges faced by nowadays users of cognitive tasks analysis (CTA) techniques. Despite the fact that CTA is recognised as an important prerequisite for the HCI design process, offering important benefits for quality of a final product, more than often the designers will rather ignore the presentations of CTA techniques provided by sophisticated research reports and papers. A communication effort would be therefore necessary in order to identify and present relevant information for practical applications in a more user-friendly manner, easier to be comprehended, and transferred into practice, with clearer usability bench-marks and more precise directions regarding its integration in subsequent designing stages. It is suggested that a further challenge would be to test various CTA techniques in real design contexts, and asses their effectiveness and efficiency against specific tasks and situations, special design problems and particular organizational structures.

119-130

Authors: Marian Dardala, Adriana Reveiu, Titus Felix Furtună

Multimedia applications use special techniques to browse their own content such as hypertext and hypermedia. These two concepts provide for the users semantic alternative in accessing a multimedia document. A particular way of achieving the concept of hypermedia is hypervideo. The main difficulty for realize such a system is given the fact that video data has spatial feature as well as a temporal dimension that means it lasts in time. To implement a hypervideo system has to define many modules having specialized functions and that are going to communicate each other. Thus, the article presents a data structure adapted to manage the synchronization of user interaction events, according to the timeline of the video sequence and the objects in view, which received the event. Besides the particular data structure are also presented usual operations for its maintaining as well as to explore it in the hypervideo system context.

147-160

Authors: Alexandru Balog, Irina Cristescu

The user acceptance of new technologies and systems is a topic of interest for many researchers working in various areas. In this paper we present the main theories employed in assesing the technology acceptance (theory of reasoned action, theory of planned behavior) as well as the technology acceptance models that have been developed on the basis of these theories. The focus is on the model constructs and, implicitely, on the hypotheses that have to be tested in order to validate the technology acceptance models in different contexts of use.

1-17

Authors: Verginica Barbu Mititelu, Alexandru Ceauşu, Radu Ion, Elena Irimia, Dan Stefanescu, Dan Tufis

We describe here several language resources (a lexicon, a paradigmatic morphology, two linguistic thesauri – the Romanian wordnet and Eurovoc – and a parallel multilingual corpus) from the perspective of their utility especially in question-answering tasks. We present the stages of the automatic finding of an answer to a question written by a user in a natural language. Wherever necessary, we show the way in which the linguistic resources contribute to various problems solving. The lexicon is a sort of spellchecker for the user’s question. The paradigmatic morphology is used for lemmatizing the question and the corpus. The Romanian wordnet is useful for query expansion, for identifying the lexical chains between words senses and for answers retrieval in a mono- and a multilingual system. The Eurovoc thesaurus is used for segmentation and lemmatization of the user’s question and of the parallel multilingual corpus from which the answer is retrieved. The architecture of the question-answering system described here is language independent; the language resources, however, are, inherently, language dependent (e.g. the lexicon, the paradigmatic morphology); exceptions make those whose organization or structure allows for a multilingual perspective (e.g. the thesauri and the corpus); in our case, they are aligned.

31-44

Authors: Costin Pribeanu

The quality of interactive systems is an important concern that brings in front the ergonomic quality of the user interface. Formative usability evaluation aims at identification and analysis of usability problems as early in the develompment process. For this purpose, a detailed description is needed as well as a classification according to different criteria: impact, context, explanation and suggestion for improvement. An acurate description which is agreed by the evaluation team and communicated to designers improves the product quality and motivates the process of fixing usability problems. In this paper we present a task-based approach to the design of a software tool to assist evaluators during the tasks of collecting, organization and retrieval of usability problems. In the case of heuristic evaluation and / or guidelines-based evaluation the software tools should satisfy two kinds of requirements: providing with appropriate heuristics / guidelines and recording of usability problems. These requirements are resulting from a task analysis and lead to develop a flexible software tool that could be used either as a stand-alone tool or integrated with an existing tool for working with guidelines.

73-88

Authors: Cristina Niculescu, Stefan Trausan-Matu

The paper presents an ontology-centered approach for designing an interactive competence management system for IT companies. This type of approach helps to shift the focus from a function-oriented, tool-centric view, towards a semantic-oriented view. In the paper are covered subjects as: ontologies definitions, generic architecture of the competence management system (CMS), structure of CMS ontology, building and working the ontology (integrity and inference of the ontology, knowledge acquisition, conceptualization phase, querying types of concepts). The advantage of using an ontology-based system is the possibility of the identification of new relations among concepts based on inferences starting from the existing knowledge. The user can choose to query instances of one type of concept, based on the relations that are displayed for him/her in a dropping menu. In addition to choosing relations modeled in the ontology, the user may also query inferred relations that are not explicitly stored in the knowledge base. Other search type is browsing the ontology. The skeleton of the ontology is seen as a tree with nodes and hyperlinks that point to other concepts or instances. Starting from base-concepts, the user can get specific information about any instance or concept. The paper also presents some use-cases, conclusions and further developments.