Romanian Conference on Human-Computer Interaction

5-10

Authors: Panayiotis Zaphiris

This paper reports work regarding the design, development and evaluation of a surface computing application to support collaborative decision making.. The domain-independent application, so called Ideas Mapping, builds on the principle of Affinity Diagramming to allow participants to analyze a problem and brainstorm around possible solutions while they actively construct a consensus artifact -- a taxonomy of their ideas. During idea generation, Ideas Mapping replicates physical post-it notes on a multi-touch tabletop. Additional functionality supports student collaboration and interaction around the organization of ideas into thematic categories associated with the problem at hand. We report on the functionality and user experience while interacting with the application which was designed and developed using a user-centered approach. We also report initial findings regarding the affordances of surface computing for collaborative decision making.

15-20

Authors: Paul Doney, Marc Fabri

The application of persuasive technology has been shown to be effective in a weight management context. However, it has been observed that the impact is not as significant as predicted. The aim of this project was to investigate whether a Design Thinking approach could generate new insights that could be used to drive the development of an innovative application to help people on their weight management journey. Findings show that although no radically new user needs were identified, the needs that users did express most pertinently are not effectively met by currently available technology. Further, we examined the Design Thinking approach itself and sought to identify criteria for the design of successful insight gathering activities, through end-user engagement. We summarize these at the end of this paper.

25-28

Authors: Costin Pribeanu, Maria Gheorghe-Moisii, Paul Fogarassy-Neszly

Several initiatives at European level exist that promote e-inclusion and web accessibility. Despite all concerns, the accessibility of municipal websites is still low. This paper presents a study regarding the conformance of 60 municipal websites in 2014 with WCAG2 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines). A comparison of results with similar data in 2011 shows a decrease in web accessibility that could be explained by the lack of regulations at national level and bad practices in web development. Moreover, the evaluation revealed instability of results in time which makes it difficult assessing the progress.

37-40

Authors: Vlad Trifanica, Alexandru Butean, Alin Moldoveanu, Diana Butean

Visually impaired people, completely or partially blind cannot perceive the surrounding environment as normal healthy people can. Not knowing how colors and shapes look like is a serious penalty and they have to live with it an entire life. It is known that the human brain adapts and compensates with greater capabilities for hearing and touch when vision is low or missing, that is why blind people develop special skills and perform so good when it comes to music and kinetotherapy. Based on this information we are proposing a method that explains colors using vibrations. In this paper we would like to present a new way of transforming an image to vibration by using the capabilities of an Xbox gamepad. During the study on real blind volunteers, this kind of approach proved to be very effective and promising, allowing them to slightly understand how an image, painting or friend looks like.

49-54

Authors: Oana Balan, Alin Moldoveanu, Florica Moldoveanu, Alexandru Butean

The Binaural Navigation Game is a 3D audio game with hierarchical levels of difficulty that can be used by both normal sighted or visually impaired players. The purpose of the game is to test and train the sound localization skills, to entertain and to provide an alternative to the common video games available on the market nowadays. The sonification technique is based on the perception of 3D binaural sounds synthesized with non-individualized Head Related Transfer Functions (HRTFs) and on the inversely proportional sound intensity encoding of distance. Furthermore, we use an original method based on the simultaneous perception of two types of noise that aims to reduce the incidence of front-back confusions. This game has been tested in an experimental procedure (comprised of a pre-test, a haptic-auditory feedback based training and a post-test session) in which 10 visually impaired subjects (with a percent of residual vision ranging from 0% to 15%) have participated. This paper aims to present the design and development of the Binaural Navigation Game, the Game Editor (an application that allows the experimenter to set the layout of new sets of levels) and the Binaural Game Analyzer, a tool used to visualize and evaluate the players’ performances.

61-66

Authors: Mihaela Colhon

In this article we present a method for generating and applying syntactic motivated patterns in order to develop a foreign language learning mechanism. The patterns have been extracted from a parallel corpus that has been automatically annotated for morpho-syntactic descriptions and syntactic constituents. The proposed language learning framework is not designed around the well-known list of words. Using this application, the user does not necessarily practice the foreign language lexicon, which is supposed to be known at a medium level. Instead, with this application, the user is guided to learn the so-called “translation knowledge”.

75-80

Authors: Ionut Cristian Paraschiv, Mihai Dascalu, Stefan Trausan-Matu, Philippe Dessus

The annotation of articles from a given domain and the generation of semantic metadata can be considered a reliable foundation for creating a paper recommender system. Within this paper, the models from other previous researches are extended with the capability of visualizing articles and the most important concepts from a domain within imposed timeframes. This can be very useful for researchers to check out the most important publications from a given period, to view which are the trends and how a domain has evolved. Our previous analyses used the articles to build a paper graph and to suggest the most relevant articles, given a user defined query in natural language. This research contains a use case and creates visual graph representations to enhance the overall perception of the evolution of a domain.

87-90

Authors: Andrei-Bogdan Baran, Adrian Iftene

Health care industry is one of the most interesting domains where we can bring innovative and smart technologies that can have a big positive impact on our health. These days people are starting to be more and more concerned about their health and they are interested in having small wearable devices that allow them to be able to get real time data through different sensors regarding the environment or different activities they are involved in. In this paper we will show how new disruptive technologies can be used to monitored the level of the ultraviolet radiation and then how the user can be notified about that.

95-100

Authors: Szabolcs Orban, Teodor Stefanut

This article presents an innovative approach in offering indoor navigation assistance based on mobile device sensors and a 3D model of the building. We will discuss the three main stages that are required in order to implement the proposed solution: (1) creation of the 3D model, (2) definition of the navigation attributes (built to also support localization) and (3) implementation of all the required functionalities in an Android application. One of our main concerns is related to the identification of the current location of the user in an indoor environment efficiently using the device's sensors. For this purpose we will describe an algorithm that relies on the accelerometer and the compass to provide accurate location information and to simulate the movement of the user into the environment, without consuming too much energy.

105-110

Authors: George Marian Hotca, Teodor Stefanut, Dorian Gorgan

This paper presents the LivingRoom platform for online socialization within the 3D virtual space. The user is represented by an avatar that is moving around the virtual space and can communicate with other avatars. The audio and video communication among avatars is triggered by their interactions similarly with the human action within the real world.

114-120

Authors: Mihai Chifor, Teodor Stefanut

Virtual Reality applications have known an accelerated development in the past few years stimulated by the advancements in the hardware capabilities and also by the benefits from the similarity with the real world. However, the available solutions for immersive VR are still very expensive and often lack the friendliness expected on user interaction techniques. In this paper we will present a low cost, immersive, VR capable setup based on two new technologies: Google Cardboard and Leap Motion. The proposed solution is showcased using an educational application that allows its users to virtually visit Elmwood Park Zoo, Pennsylvania and learn more on the wild animals in the process. Most of the user interactions are performed through hand described gestures inspired from the real world, helping the users to accommodate more easily and perform naturally in the virtual environment.

129-132

Authors: Cristian Ionita, Alexandru Barbulescu

The OpenGL ES standard is implemented in modern desktop and mobile browsers through the WebGL API. This paper explores the potential for using OpenGL ES hardware acceleration for real time video processing in standard HTML5 applications. We analyze the WebGL performance across device types and compare it with the standard JavaScript and canvas performance.

137-140

Authors: Alexandru Balog, Costin Pribeanu, Ion Ivan

students is raising several research questions regarding the characteristics of use. In the context of modern school, the academic use and the usage related to the university context are of special interest. This paper aims at analyzing the motives for the use of Facebook and the characteristics of Facebook use by students from a Romanian university. The results show that the motives of using Facebook are mainly related to communicating with friends, to find out what happens in their university and to keep in touch with former high school colleagues. The results revealed significant differences between male and female students in terms of motives of using, network size, frequency and duration of use. Female students have more Facebook friends and spend more time on Facebook than male students. Moreover, significant differences exist between undergraduate and master students.

145-148

Authors: Paul Fogarassy-Neszly, Zlatomir Zinveliu, Costin Pribeanu

Text-to-speech synthesis has many applications in the area of assistive technologies for visually impaired people. Some applications require multilingual text-to-speech synthesis. In this case, multilingual text analysis and voice switching are desirable. In this paper an improved functional version (beta) of a software component for polyglot text-to-speech synthesis is presented. Beta testing results are useful to reveal the optimal level of parameters and suggest new directions to improve the method and algorithms. Testing results show that the new version of the component is able to automatically detect the language with a reasonable accuracy from texts with a variable degree of fragmentation.