Chris Creed

• Professor (Associate) at Birmingham City University

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a review of the experiences in working collaboratively with physically impaired visual artists and other stakeholders (e.g. disability arts organisations, charities, personal assistants, special needs colleges, assistive technologists, etc.) to explore the potential of digital assistive tools to sup...

Wheelchair users can find accessing digital content on large multi-touch tables particularly difficult and frustrating due to their limited reach. We present work in progress that is exploring the potential of enhancing touch table accessibility through the use of mid-air gesturing technology. An overview of an experimental prototype is provided al...

We present work-in-progress that is exploring the potential for visual artists with physical impairments to use new non-intrusive mid-air gesturing sensors to enhance and extend their practice. We highlight the key results from an initial informal user evaluation with two disabled and two non-disabled visual artists examining use of the Leap Motion...

Embodied agents have received large amounts of interest in recent years. They are often equipped with the ability to express emotion, but without understanding the impact this can have on the user. Given the amount of research studies that are utilising agent technology with affective capabilities, now is an important time to review the influence o...

Prior research has highlighted numerous accessibility barriers within virtual reality software, with guidelines emerging to address the requirements of diverse audiences. However, an empirical understanding of industry practitioner implementation of accessible guidelines within mainstream commercial applications is currently lacking. This review ad...

Speech interaction holds significant potential to make creative visual design activities more inclusive for people with physical impairments, although no work has yet investigated the feasibility of graphical object rotation via voice control. An elicitation study with disabled participants (N = 12) is initially presented where candidate voice comm...

Purpose This research explores the current working practices of voice coders with physical impairments and investigates their perceptions of a research prototype utilising a fixed grammar speech coding approach. Design/methodology/approach Semi-structured interviews were initially conducted with seven voice coders with physical impairments to unde...

Exploration of virtual reality locomotion has a rich history, including in the creation of taxonomies categorising individual techniques. However, most existing research collects data from academic sources only, with both historic industry practitioner exploration and a state-of-the-art understanding of locomotion in commercial applications compara...

Augmented and virtual reality experiences present significant barriers for disabled people, making it challenging to fully engage with immersive platforms. Whilst researchers have started to explore potential solutions addressing these accessibility issues, we currently lack a comprehensive understanding of research areas requiring further investig...

Augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) hold significant potential to transform how we communicate, collaborate, and interact with others. However, there has been a lack of work to date investigating accessibility barriers in relation to immersive technologies for people with disabilities. To address current gaps in knowledge, we led two multidiscipl...

Augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) hold significant potential to transform how we communicate, collaborate, and interact with others. However, there has been a lack of work to date investigating accessibility barriers in relation to immersive technologies for people with disabilities. To address current gaps in knowledge, we led two multidiscipl...

Voice input holds significant potential to support people with physical impairments in producing creative visual design outputs, although it is unclear whether well-established interaction methods used for manipulating graphical assets within mainstream creative applications (typically operated via a mouse, keyboard, or touch input) also present be...

The recent proliferation of immersive technology has led to the rapid adoption of consumer-ready hardware for Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR). While this increase has resulted in a variety of platforms that can offer a richer interactive experience, the advances in technology bring more variability in display types, interaction sens...

People with physical impairments can experience challenges when using traditional input devices such as a mouse and keyboard for creative visual design work. Speech interaction is an alternative input method that can facilitate a more inclusive approach for supporting creative work. However, there has been a lack of work to date investigating how t...

Character input in immersive environments is a non trivial task that has attracted much attention in recent years. This paper presents an evaluation of keyboard position, orientation and interaction together with the influence of visual interaction feedback in a controlled character input task with 27 participants in Augmented Reality (AR). It pres...

People with physical impairments who are unable to use traditional input devices (i.e. mouse and keyboard) are often excluded from technical professions (e.g. web development). Alternative input methods such as eye gaze tracking and speech recognition have become more readily available in recent years with both being explored independently to suppo...

We present a new application (“Sakura”) that enables people with physical impairments to produce creative visual design work using a multimodal gaze approach. The system integrates multiple features tailored for gaze interaction including the selection of design artefacts via a novel grid approach, control methods for manipulating canvas objects, c...

Influence of interaction fidelity and rendering quality on perceived user experience have been largely explored in Virtual Reality (VR). However, differences in interaction choices triggered by these rendering cues have not yet been explored. We present a study analysing the effect of thermal visual cues and contextual information on 50 participant...

This paper presents an evaluation of ultrasound mid-air haptics as a supplementary feedback cue for grasping and lifting virtual objects in Virtual Reality (VR). We present a user study with 27 participants and evaluate 6 different object sizes ranging from 40 mm to 100 mm. We compare three supplementary feedback cues in VR; mid-air haptics, visual...

Augmented Reality (AR) is getting close to real use cases, which is driving the creation of innovative applications and the unprecedented growth of Head-Mounted Display (HMD) devices in consumer availability. However, at present there is a lack of guidelines, common form factors and standard interaction paradigms between devices, which has resulted...

Disabled artists with physical impairments can experience significant barriers in producing creative work. Digital technologies offer alternative opportunities to support artistic practice, but there has been a lack of research investigating the impact of assistive digital tools in this context. This article explores the current practice of physica...

Wheelchair users can find accessing digital content on large multi-touch tables particularly difficult and frustrating due to their limited reach. We present work in progress that is exploring the potential of enhancing touch table accessibility through the use of mid-air gesturing technology. An overview of an experimental prototype is provided al...

We present work-in-progress that is exploring the potential for visual artists with physical impairments to use new non-intrusive mid-air gesturing sensors to enhance and extend their practice. We highlight the key results from an initial informal user evaluation with two disabled and two non-disabled visual artists examining use of the Leap Motion...

The impact of simulated embodied agent emotion has been explored in short-term studies, but no work to date has examined its impact in longer interactions that involve multiple interactions with agents. We present an embodied agent (Rachael) that simulates a health professional and attempts to help people improve their fruit and vegetable consumpti...

Multi-Touch tables are increasingly being used in public spaces such as museums, art galleries, and libraries to help to engage the public and provide access to collections. Designing applications for this type of environment where a wide variety of people can use the table raises unique interaction issues that need to be addressed. This chapter in...

Direct touch manipulation interactions with technology are now commonplace and significant interest is building around their use in the culture and heritage domain. Such interactions can give people the opportunity to explore materials and artefacts in ways that would otherwise be unavailable. These are often heavily annotated and can be linked to...

We introduce a new multi-touch table “shoaling” application that we have been working on with the new Library of Birmingham (UK). This application contains shoals of assets taken from the Library’s collections that flock and swim around the tabletop. The assets are initially represented as small circular crops taken from full-size assets that a...

Multi-touch tables can help facilitate and improve collaborative interactions yet many users with physical disabilities (e.g. wheelchair users) find it extremely difficult to interact with large tables. This paper presents work-in-progress that is exploring the potential to enhance multi-touch table accessibility to enable disabled users to par...

The CASAM project aims to provide a tool for more efficient and effective annotation of multimedia documents through collaboration between a user and a system performing an au-tomated analysis of the media content. A critical part of the project is to develop a user interface which supports both the user and the system working co-operatively and as...

This paper investigates how users respond to emotional expressions displayed by an embodied agent. In a between-subjects experiment (N = 50) an emotionally expressive agent (simulating the role of a nutritional coach) was perceived as significantly more likeable and caring than an unemotional version. Feedback from participants also revealed detail...

In a cooperative mixed-initiative system, timely and effective dialogue between the system and user is important to ensure that both sides work towards producing the most effective results, and this is affected by how disruptive any interruptions are as the user completes their primary task. A disruptive interaction means the user may become irrita...

For mixed-initiative multimedia annotation systems an effective dialogue between the system and user is critical. In order to inform the development of such dialogue a clear insight into the impact of interruptions upon the perceptions of the user is required. We present preliminary results of an investigation into interruptions in the form of quer...

We describe work in progress toward a new approach for multimedia annotation in which the system and user work synergistically together. This work in progress is particularly focused on enabling journalists to efficiently annotate articles for submission to news agencies. Initial work on gathering user requirements is detailed along with several in...

Numerous research groups around the world are attempting to build realistic and believable autonomous embodied agents that attempt to have natural interactions with users. Research into these entities has primarily focused on their potential to enhance human-computer interaction. As a result, there is little understanding of the potential for embod...

Why do computers need emotional intelligence? Science fiction often portrays emotional computers as dangerous and frightening, and as a serious threat to human life. One of the most famous examples is HAL, the supercomputer onboard the spaceship Discovery, in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL could express, recognize and respond to human emotion...

Embodied agents are often designed with the ability to simulate human emotion. This paper investigates the psychological impact of simulated emotional expressions on computer users with a particular emphasis on how mismatched facial and audio expressions are perceived (e.g. a happy face with a concerned voice). In a within-subjects repeated measure...

Affect and emotion play an important role in our everyday lives: They are present whatever we do, wherever we are, and wherever we go, without us being aware of them for much of the time. When it comes to interaction, be it with humans, technology, or humans via technology, we suddenly become more aware of emotion, either by seeing the other’s emot...

Computational agents which make use of behaviour change models have the potential to help motivate people to change problematic behaviour. The importance of emotion simulation in behaviour change agents is discussed, along with an overview of a behaviour change model (the Transtheoretical Model (1)) that computational agents can make use of. Experi...

An important strand of research that is often neglected in the field of affective computing is that of how users respond to simulated displays of emotion. We present an overview of the few studies that have explicitly investigated this space and discuss a number of issues related to simulated emotion research. An overview of our own work in this ar...

Recent research has suggested that affective embodied agents that can effectively express simulated emotion have the potential to build and maintain long-term relationships with users. We present our experiences in this space and detail the wide array of design and evaluation issues we had to take into consideration when building an affective embod...

Abstract Humans have a natural tendency to unconsciously treat computers as though they are social actors. Many of the human-human,social rules that have been well re- searched and defined in social psychology also seem to apply in human-computer interaction (HCI). This presents an opportunity for computers to use many of the principles and rules f...

Advocates of embodied agents often assume that such agents will enhance human-computer interaction (HCI) as they take advantage of our pre-existing social skills and provide an interface that is natural and engaging to use. But this is not guaranteed. A discussion is provided detailing some of the key technical and social issues that will need to b...