A Game of Love for Women: Social Support in Otome Game Mr. Love: Queen’s Choice in ChinaOtome games (also known as romantic video games, or RVGs) are story-based video games that are designed for young women, simulating the experience of a romantic relationship. Players are invited to adopt the female avatar’s perspective in the story and date one or more of the male characters. Our empirical study focuses on the different types of social support among the players of the Chinese otome game Mr. Love: Queen’s Choice. We discovered that although the game was initially designed to be a consumer product aiming to profit from a largely marginalized and stigmatized group of gamers, i.e., young female gamers, the game has created a gaming community in which the players seek and provide each other with social support. We primarily use ethnographic methods, including participant observation and in-depth interviews. Our study contributes to HCI research on mediated social support in game.2024QLQinyuan Lei et al.City University of Hong Kong, Southern University of Science and TechnologyRole-Playing & Narrative GamesEmpowerment of Marginalized GroupsCHI
Work with AI and Work for AI: Autonomous Vehicle Safety Drivers’ Lived ExperiencesThe development of Autonomous Vehicle (AV) has created a novel job, the safety driver, recruited from experienced drivers to supervise and operate AV in numerous driving missions. Safety drivers usually work with non-perfect AV in high-risk real-world traffic environments for road testing tasks. However, this group of workers is under-explored in the HCI community. To fill this gap, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 26 safety drivers. Our results present how safety drivers cope with defective algorithms and shape and calibrate their perceptions while working with AV. We found that, as front-line workers, safety drivers are forced to take risks accumulated from the AV industry upstream and are also confronting restricted self-development in working for AV development. We contribute the first empirical evidence of the lived experience of safety drivers, the first passengers in the development of AV, and also the grassroots workers for AV, which can shed light on future human-AI interaction research.2023MCMengdi Chu et al.Tsinghua UniversityAutomated Driving Interface & Takeover DesignAI-Assisted Decision-Making & AutomationCHI
De-Stijl: Facilitating Graphics Design with Interactive 2D Color Palette RecommendationSelecting a proper color palette is critical in crafting a high-quality graphic design to gain visibility and communicate ideas effectively. To facilitate this process, we propose De-Stijl, an intelligent and interactive color authoring tool to assist novice designers in crafting harmonic color palettes, achieving quick design iterations, and fulfilling design constraints. Through De-Stijl, we contribute a novel 2D color palette concept that allows users to intuitively perceive color designs in context with their proportions and proximities. Further, De-Stijl implements a holistic color authoring system that supports 2D palette extraction, theme-aware and spatial-sensitive color recommendation, and automatic graphical elements (re)colorization. We evaluated De-Stijl through an in-lab user study by comparing the system with existing industry standard tools, followed by in-depth user interviews. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that De-Stijl is effective in assisting novice design practitioners to quickly colorize graphic designs and easily deliver several alternatives.2023XSAlark Joshi et al.University of Waterloo360° Video & Panoramic ContentGraphic Design & Typography ToolsPrototyping & User TestingCHI
Estimating 3D Finger Pose via 2D-3D Fingerprint MatchingTouchscreens have become the primary input devices for smartphones, tablet computers, and other intelligent devices over the past decades. While for the most pervasive commercial devices, only 2D touch positions on the screen are utilized as interaction inputs. To extend the richness of the input vocabulary, some researchers have proposed several innovative interaction techniques, e.g. finger pose. However, due to the low resolution and lacking in information of capacitive images, only two angles, pitch and yaw, are considered in most finger pose estimation algorithms, and the accuracy is not sufficiently high for large scale applications in smartphones. With the rapid development of under-screen fingerprint sensing technology, a new input modality, fingerprint image, for 3D finger pose estimation is available from these fingerprint sensors. In this paper, we propose a finger specific algorithm for estimating 3D finger pose including roll, pitch, and yaw from fingerprint images. 3D finger surface is first reconstructed based on sequential fingerprint images captured in enrollment, and given this 3D surface model, 3D finger pose of a test fingerprint is estimated by matching keypoints between the 2D image and 3D point cloud and minimizing the projection error. The proposed approach is a non-learning algorithm with good generalization ability and robustness in real applications. To evaluate the performance of our method, a dataset of fingerprint images with their corresponding ground truth 3D angles is collected. Experimental results on this dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of introducing reconstructed 3D finger surface shape in 3D finger pose estimation. The average absolute errors of three angles are 10.74 for roll, 8.25 for pitch, and 7.38 for yaw, respectively. Extensive experiments are also conducted to explore the impact of touching area size and gallery size on performance.2022YDYongjie Duan et al.Hand Gesture RecognitionHuman Pose & Activity RecognitionIUI
Exploring the Weak Association between Flow Experience and Performance in Virtual EnvironmentsMany studies conducted in non-virtual activities have shown that flow significantly influences performance, yet studies in virtual activities often reveal only a weak association. This paper begins by building a theoretical explanatory model, and then conducts 3 empirical studies to explore this question. Study 1 exams the mechanism of weak association in two virtual activities. Study 2 tests the effectiveness of a potential approach to strengthen this association. In Study 3 we applied our proposed model and design approach to optimize a VR tennis game. Results show that the influence of flow on performance was not significant in those virtual activities where the primary task and the operation of interactive artifacts were less congruent such that the artifacts can lead to flow experience that is independently of the primary task. Our research offers a theoretical and empirical basis on how to optimize virtual environment design and maximize positive effect of the flow experience.2018YBYulong Bian et al.Shandong UniversityImmersion & Presence ResearchSerious & Functional GamesCHI
ReactionBot: Exploring the Effects of Expression-Triggered Emoji in Text MessagesIn this paper we present ReactionBot, a system that attaches emoji based on users’ facial expressions to text messages on Slack. Through a study of 16 dyads, we found that ReactionBot was able to help communicate participants’ affect, reducing the need for participants to self-react with emoji during conversations. However, contrary to our hypothesis, ReactionBot reduced social presence (behavioral interdependence) between dyads. Post study interviews suggest that the emotion feedback through ReactionBot indeed provided valuable nonverbal cues: offered more genuine feedback, and participants were more aware of their own emotions. However, this can come at the cost of increasing anxiety from concerns about negative emotion leakage. Further, the more active role of the system in facilitating the conversation can also result in unwanted distractions and may have attributed to the reduced sense of behavioral interdependence. We discuss implications for utilizing this type of cues in text-based communication.2018MLCan Liu et al.Presence and DistanceCSCW