Enrico Rukzio

Ulm University | UULM · Institute of Media Informatics

Projectors are pervasive as infrastructure devices for large displays but are now also becoming available in small form factors that afford mobile personal use. This article surveys the interaction space of "projectors on the move" and reviews input and output concepts, underlying sensing challenges, and emerging applications.

Smartphones provide large amounts of personal data, functionalities, and apps and make a substantial part of our daily communication. But during phone calls the phone cannot be used much beyond voice communication and does not offer support for synchronous collaboration. This is owed to the fact that first, despite the availability of alternatives,...

Touchscreens became the dominant input device for smartphones. Users' touch behaviour has been widely studied in lab studies with a relative low number of participants. In contrast, we published a game in the Android Market that records the touch behaviour when executing a controlled task to collect large amounts of touch events. Players' task is t...

Automated vehicles should improve both traffic safety and user experience. While novel behavior patterns such as platooning become feasible to reduce fuel usage, such time-and fuel-reducing behavior at intersections can be perceived as unsafe and possibly disconcert users. Therefore, we designed and implemented nine feedback strategies for a simula...

Automated vehicles will change the interaction with the user drastically. While freeing the user of the driving task for most of the journey, the "final 100 meters problem", directing the vehicle to the final parking spot, could require human intervention. Therefore, we present a classification of interaction concepts for automated vehicles based o...

Automated vehicles are expected to substitute or even improve driver-driver communication, for example, via LED strips or displays. Numerous situations exist where ambiguities have to be resolved via gestures or implicit communication (i.e., movement). An already demanding situation is the unsignalized four-way intersection. Additionally, Vehicle-T...

Infrastructure-mounted sensors that monitor roads can provide essential information for manual drivers and automated vehicles, e.g., positions of other vehicles occluded by buildings. However, human drivers and passengers have to trust and accept their use. This raises the question of how trust can be increased in such a scenario. One important fac...

Investigating trust, acceptance, and attitudes towards automated driving is often investigated in simulator experiments. Therefore, behavioral validity is a crucial aspect of automated driving studies. However, static simulators have reduced behavioral validity because of their inherent safe environment. We propose VAMPIRE (VR automated movement pl...

Virtual reality (VR) environments offer new opportunities for mastering complex procedures (e.g. manipulating 3D objects). Novices might be confronted with challenges that they can overcome with the help of an expert. For example, expert strategy instruction might facilitate the performance of 3D object manipulations. Moreover, the available intera...

Automated vehicles are expected to communicate with pedestrians at least during the introductory phase, for example, via LED strips, displays, or loudspeakers. While these are added to minimize confusion and increase trust, the human passenger within the vehicle could perform motions that a pedestrian could misinterpret as opposing the vehicle’s co...

Automotive user interfaces constantly change due to increasing automation, novel features, additional applications, and user demands. While in-vehicle interaction can utilize numerous promising modalities, no existing overview includes an extensive set of human sensors and actuators and interaction locations throughout the vehicle interior. We cond...

The successful introduction of automated vehicles (AVs) depends on the user's acceptance. To gain acceptance, the intended user must trust the technology, which itself relies on an appropriate understanding. Visualizing internal processes could aid in this. For example, the functional hierarchy of autonomous vehicles distinguishes between perceptio...

Interacting with a group of people requires to direct the attention of the whole group, thus requires feedback about the crowd’s attention. In face-to-face interactions, head and eye movements serve as indicator for crowd attention. However, when interacting online, such indicators are not available. To substitute this information, gaze visualizati...

Webcam-based eye-tracking promises easy and quick data collection without the need for specific or additional eye-tracking hardware. This makes it especially attractive for educational research, in particular for modern formats, such as MOOCs. However, in order to fulfill its promises, webcam-based eye tracking has to overcome several challenges, m...

Large high-resolution displays (LHRDs) provide an enabling technology to achieve immersive, isometrically registered, virtual environments. It has been shown that LHRDs allow better size judgments, higher collaboration performance, and shorter task completion times. This paper presents novel insights into human size perception using large-scale flo...

Automated vehicles are expected to require some form of communication (e.g., via LED strip or display) with vulnerable road users such as pedestrians. However, the passenger inside the automated vehicle could perform gestures or motions which could potentially be interpreted by the pedestrian as contradictory to the outside communication of the car...

Personal fabrication is made more accessible through repositories like Thingiverse, as they replace modeling with retrieval. However, they require users to translate spatial requirements to keywords, which paints an incomplete picture of physical artifacts: proportions or morphology are non-trivially encoded through text only. We explore a vision o...

Automated trucks for long-distance journeys seem within reach. With such automation, no human driver could be available. However, the last mile of the delivery is likely to involve humans. Therefore, either a human driver should still be present, or construction site workers must interact with the automated truck. While automated trucks capable of...

The automation of the driving task affects both the primary driving task and the automotive user interfaces. The liberation of user interface space and cognitive load on the driver allows for new ways to think about driving. Related work showed that activities such as sleeping, watching TV, or working will become more prevalent in the future. Howev...

Autonomous vehicles provide new input modalities to improve interaction with in-vehicle information systems. However, due to the road and driving conditions, the user input can be perturbed, resulting in reduced interaction quality. One challenge is assessing the vehicle motion effects on the interaction without an expensive high-fidelity simulator...

Personal fabrication empowers users to create objects increasingly easier and faster. This continuous decrease in effort evokes a speculative scenario of Ephemeral Fabrication (EF), enabled and amplified by emerging paradigms of mobile, wearable, or even body-integrated fabrication. EF yields fast, temporary, in-situ solutions for everyday problems...

Players can get stuck in video games, which impedes their process to their goal and results in unfavorable outcomes like negative emotions, impediments of flow, and obstacles for learning. Currently, it is not easily possible to assess if a player is stuck, as no widely accepted definition of "being stuck" in games exists. We conducted 13 expert in...

Passengers of automated vehicles will likely engage in non-driving related activities like reading and, therefore, be disengaged from the driving task. However, especially in critical situations such as unexpected pedestrian crossings, it can be assumed that passengers request information about the vehicle's intention and an explanation. Some conce...

Locomotion is one of the most essential interaction tasks in virtual reality (VR) with teleportation being widely accepted as the state-of-the-art locomotion technique at the time of this writing. A major draw-back of teleportation is the accompanying physical rotation that is necessary to adjust the users' orientation either before or after telepo...

Evaluating the user experience of a software system is an essential final step of every research. Several concepts such as flow, affective state, presences, or immersion exist to measure user experience. Typical measurement techniques analyze physiological data, gameplay data, and questionnaires. Qualitative feedback methods are another approach to...

Digital human simulation is important for various domains such as the entertainment, health care and production industries. A variety of simulation techniques and tools are available, ranging from motion-capture-based animation systems and deep learning to physics-based motion synthesis. Each technology has its advantages and disadvantages and is s...

The tools for personal digital fabrication (DF) are on the verge of reaching mass-adoption beyond technology enthusiasts, empowering consumers to fabricate personalized artifacts. We argue that to achieve similar outreach and impact as personal computing, personal fabrication research may have to venture beyond ever-simpler interfaces for creation,...

The tools for personal digital fabrication (DF) are on the verge of reaching mass-adoption beyond technology enthusiasts, empowering consumers to fabricate personalized artifacts. We argue that to achieve similar outreach and impact as personal computing, personal fabrication research may have to venture beyond ever-simpler interfaces for creation,...

Automated vehicles can implement strategies to drive with optimized fuel efficiency. Therefore, automated driving is seen as a major advancement in tackling climate change. However, with automated vehicles driving in cities and other areas rife with other road users such as human drivers, pedestrians, or cyclists, there is the potential for "stop-a...

The design of graphical augmented reality (AR) markers requires compromise between the aesthetic appearance and tracking reliability. To investigate the topic, we created a virtual reality (VR) pipeline to evaluate marker performance, and validated it against real-world performance for a set of graphical AR markers. We report that, with the well kn...

Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs) are the dominant form of enabling Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) for personal use. One of the biggest challenges of HMDs is the exclusion of people in the vicinity, such as friends or family. While recent research on asymmetric interaction for VR HMDs has contributed to solving this problem in the VR do...

Adoption and use of smartphone-based asynchronous voice messaging has increased substantially in recent years. However, this communication channel has a strong tendency to polarize. To provide an understanding of this modality, we started by conducting an online survey (=1,003) exploring who is using voice messages, their motives, and utilization....

Media (e.g. videos, images, and text) shared on social platforms such as Facebook and WeChat are often visually enriched through digital content (e.g. emojis, stickers, animal faces) increasing joy, personalization, and expressiveness. While voice messages (VMs) are experiencing a high frequent usage, they currently lack any form of digital augment...

Many people utilize audio equipment to escape from noises around them, leading to the desired isolation but also dangerously reduced awareness. Mediation of sounds through smarter headphones (e.g., hearables) could address this by providing nonuniform interaction with sounds while retaining a comfortable, yet informative soundscape. In a week-long...

The accessibility of tools to model artifacts is one of the core driving factors for the adoption of Personal Fabrication. Subsequently, model repositories like Thingiverse became important tools in (novice) makers' processes. They allow them to shorten or even omit the design process, offloading a majority of the effort to other parties. However,...

Adaptive virtual environments are an opportunity to support users and increase their flow, presence, immersion, and overall experience. Possible fields of application are adaptive individual education, gameplay adjustment, professional work, and personalized content. But who benefits more from this adaptivity, the users who can enjoy a greater user...

Virtual and augmented reality head-mounted displays (HMDs) are currently heavily relying on spatially tracked input devices (STID) for interaction. These STIDs are all prone to the phenomenon that a discrete input (e.g. button press) will disturb the position of the tracker, resulting in a different selection point during ray-cast interaction (Heis...

One of the great benefits of virtual reality (VR) is the implementation of features that go beyond realism. Common “unrealistic” locomotion techniques (like teleportation) can avoid spatial limitation of tracking, but minimize potential benefits of more realistic techniques (e.g. walking). As an alternative that combines realistic physical movement...

People with vision impairments (VIP) are among the most vulnerable road users in traffic. Autonomous vehicles are believed to reduce accidents but still demand some form of external communication signaling relevant information to pedestrians. Recent research on the design of vehicle-pedestrian communication (VPC) focuses strongly on concepts for a...

The traffic system is a complex network with numerous individuals (e.g., drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians) and vehicles involved. Road systems vary in various aspects such as the number of lanes, right of way, and configuration. With the emergence of autonomous vehicles, this system will change. Research has already addressed the missing communic...

Autonomous vehicles are about to enter the mass market and with it a complex socio-technical system including vulnerable road users such as pedestrians and cyclists. Communication from autonomous vehicles to vulnerable road users can ease the introduction of and aids in understanding the intention of these. Various modalities and messages to commun...