Merry Christmas 2015!

Dear colleagues and friends,

we hope you received your exclusive hcilab xmas construction kit, version 4.0. The design is inspired by the traditional German Christmas pyramid (instructions for last year’s Christmas kit you find here). To fully enjoy the hcilab Christmas experience, here are quick steps to a successful assembly:

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Click here to see the instructions

This is the first construction kit that – if assembled right – will move. We are curious about your result and we would like to see if it really moves. Please take a picture or better a movie of your final version and we would be happy if you email it to us, or if you share your accomplishment with us on facebook or link to it in a blog comment.

It is now – nearly by the day – 5 years that our group started at the University of Stuttgart. The group is much bigger now than we anticipated, and hence we work closer together (=more people have to share a room).

Absence leads to productivity?

While Albrecht enjoyed his time in Cambridge working with Per Ola Kristensson at the University and with Steve Hodges’ Sensor and Devices group at Microsoft Research, the group was very productive.

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CHI2015 in Korea

The ACM SIGCHI was this year for the first time in Asia and we participated, presenting research results in different forms.

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Postdoc++ == Professor

At the moment we are without postdocs, as Katrin Wolf and Oliver Korn left us. Katrin accepted an offer from the University of Art & Design in Berlin (btk) and is now Professor for media informatics. Oliver Korn joint Offenburg University of Applied Sciences and is now professor for human computer interaction. We are looking forward to 2016 and to the new postdocs we have hired.

German HCI conference with 750+ People in Stuttgart

In September we ran the German HCI conference Mensch und Computer, which had more than 750 attendees. Organizing such a conference at the University is a major undertaking and it kept many of us very busy.
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Book with some of our research highlights

Our institute is growing and we have a book to highlight ongoing projects and research in Computer Graphics, Visualization, Computer Vision, and Human-Computer-Interaction. The book is in German and online available as PDF. For the project in Human-Computer-Interaction and Socio-Cognitive Systems see from page 53 onwards.

hci2015 Capture

New and Ongoing Projects

This year four new larger projects started and we have several ongoing projects – too many to describe all of them. If you are around in Europe Stuttgart is really close – please take the chance and visit us. Here are some pointers to the larger projects:

New projects in 2015

SFB-TRR161 (DFG funded). Collaborative Research Center on Quantitative Methods for Visual Computing with University of Konstanz and the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen.
CIMPLEX (EU H2020 funded). Bringing CItizens, Models and Data together in Participatory, Interactive SociaL EXploratories
DAAN (BMBF funded). Design of ambient adaptive notification environments.
FeuerWeRR (BMBF funded). Augmented reality thermal camera for fire fighters.

Ongoing projects

MotionEAP (BMWi funded and extended as everyone is excited by the outcome so far): increasing efficiency in manual production through projected augmented reality. < http://www.motioneap.de/ >

Recall (European Project): Re-thining and re-defining memory augmentation. Augmenting the human mind has many facets.

SimpleSkin (European Project): Cheap, textile based whole body sensing systems for interaction, physiological monitoring, and activity recognition.

meSch (European Project): Material EncounterS with digital cultural Heritage.

SimTech (DFG funded): Interaction with simulation systems.

We are looking forward to a set of projects starting in 2016 and would like to wish all collegues, friends, acquaintances, and our families the very best for 2016!

— Albrecht Schmidt

Some Publications in 2015

Florian Alt, Stefan Schneegass, Alireza Sahami Shirazi, Mariam Hassib, and Andreas Bulling. 2015. Graphical Passwords in the Wild: Understanding How Users Choose Pictures and Passwords in Image-based Authentication Schemes. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI ’15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 316-322.

Katrin Wolf, Stefan Schneegass, Niels Henze, Dominik Weber, Valentin Schwind, Pascal Knierim, Sven Mayer, Tilman Dingler, Yomna Abdelrahman, Thomas Kubitza, Markus Funk, Anja Mebus, and Albrecht Schmidt. 2015. TUIs in the Large: Using Paper Tangibles with Mobile Devices. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1579-1584.

Yomna Abdelrahman, Alireza Sahami Shirazi, Niels Henze, and Albrecht Schmidt. 2015. Investigation of Material Properties for Thermal Imaging-Based Interaction. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 15-18.

Luis A. Leiva, Alireza Sahami, Alejandro Catala, Niels Henze, and Albrecht Schmidt. 2015. Text Entry on Tiny QWERTY Soft Keyboards. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 669-678.

Max Pfeiffer, Tim Dünte, Stefan Schneegass, Florian Alt, and Michael Rohs. 2015. Cruise Control for Pedestrians: Controlling Walking Direction using Electrical Muscle Stimulation. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2505-2514.

Niels Henze, Thomas Olsson, Stefan Schneegass, Alireza Sahami Shirazi, and Kaisa Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila. 2015. Augmenting food with information. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM ’15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 258-266.

Markus Funk, Alireza Sahami Shirazi, Sven Mayer, Lars Lischke, and Albrecht Schmidt. 2015. Pick from here!: an interactive mobile cart using in-situ projection for order picking. In Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp ’15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 601-609.

Lars Lischke, Sven Mayer, Katrin Wolf, Alireza Sahami Shirazi, and Niels Henze. 2015. Subjective and Objective Effects of Tablet’s Pixel Density. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2769-2772.

Sven Mayer, Katrin Wolf, Stefan Schneegass, and Niels Henze. 2015. Modeling Distant Pointing for Compensating Systematic Displacements. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 4165-4168.

Martin Pielot, Tilman Dingler, Jose San Pedro, and Nuria Oliver. 2015. When attention is not scarce – detecting boredom from mobile phone usage. In Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp ’15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 825-836.

Tilman Dingler and Martin Pielot. 2015. I’ll be there for you: Quantifying Attentiveness towards Mobile Messaging. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI ’15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1-5.