Josep Blat

• Professor at Pompeu Fabra University

Detailed anatomical information is essential to optimize medical decisions for surgical and pre-operative planning in patients with congenital heart disease. The visualization techniques commonly used in clinical routine for the exploration of complex cardiac data are based on multi-planar reformations, maximum intensity projection, and volume rend...

Simulating crowds requires controlling a very large number of trajectories of characters and is usually performed using crowd steering algorithms. The question of choosing the right algorithm with the right parameter values is of crucial importance given the large impact on the quality of results. In this paper, we study the performance of a number...

Physical manipulatives, such as rods or tiles, are widely used for mathematics learning, as they support embodied cognition, enable the execution of epistemic actions, and foster conceptual metaphors. Counting them, children explore, rearrange, and reinterpret the environment through the haptic channel. Vision generally complements physical actions...

Simulating crowds requires controlling a very large number of trajectories and is usually performed using crowd motion algorithms for which appropriate parameter values need to be found. The study of the relation between parametric values for simulation techniques and the quality of the resulting trajectories has been studied either through percept...

Simulating crowds requires controlling a very large number of trajectories and is usually performed using crowd motion algorithms for which appropriate parameter values need to be found. The study of the relation between parametric values for simulation techniques and the quality of the resulting trajectories has been studied either through percept...

This paper presents work-in-progress that informs a current understanding of intersectional themes (age, gender, and digital games) that are important, but under-studied, in the player-computer interaction community. This paper draws on a 4-month participant observational study of game play and interest among active older women (aged 63-83, N=14)....

Conversational user interfaces (CUIs) like Amazon Echo and Apple Siri are revolutionizing the way we interact with a range of applications by enabling us to “talk” to them. This chapter discusses two important open issues, anthropomorphism and conversational user experience, in the CUIs community. Although current voice assistants look nothing like...

Conversational user interfaces (CUIs) like Amazon Echo and Apple Siri are revolutionizing the way we interact with a range of applications by enabling us to “talk” to them. This chapter discusses two important open issues, anthropomorphism and conversational user experience, in the CUIs community. Although current voice assistants look nothing like...

Virtual characters are a key element in human-computer interaction, as these enhance the communication process via facial expressions, gestures and body postures. The process of creating facial animations is a time-consuming and laborious task. In this paper we present our recent advances in our web-based tools to animate faces. Our tools try impro...

Spherical Fibonacci grids (SFG) yield extremely uniform point set distributions on the sphere. This feature makes SFGs particularly well-suited to a wide range of computer graphics applications, from numerical integration, to vector quantization, among others. However, the application of SFGs to problems in which further refinement of an initial po...

Within Human-Computer Interaction, there has recently been an important turn to embodied and voice-based interaction. In this chapter, we discuss our ongoing research on building online Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs), specifically, their interactive 3D web graphics aspects. We present ECAs based on our technological pipeline, which integrate...

Within Human-Computer Interaction, older people (60+) are often characterized as a heterogeneous group of consumers of digital content that use ICTs in a limited way due to age-related changes in functional abilities. By drawing on an ethnographical study of ICTs use by approximately 220 older people over a 5-year period in Spain and on two rapid e...

Prompted by the authors’ reflection of their own Human-Computer Interaction research on games and older people, and analysis of previous and related works, this chapter presents a critical literature review of contemporary research on digital games with older people. This chapter argues that much of the research conducted in this field has been per...

This document reports on research activities conducted within the context of a pilot project funded by ACT (Ageing-Communication-Technologies, http://actproject.ca/). Over a 7-month period, we have looked into Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA) as an interface, in order to learn about emotional experiences of older people while designing and deve...

Visual information can be decoded very fast, letting us perceive and process a large amount of data in parallel. There is a lot of knowledge organized as guidelines and recommendations for GUI design. However, for blind people that perceive the world through auditory and haptic channels, GUIs might not fit their needs. In this paper we present a pr...

This special issue addresses two important defining features of today’s society: ageing and digital technologies. In the 21st century, ageing has become one of the most significant social transformations , as an increase in the ageing population is changing much of the world and has become visibly real in many societies. Population ageing is oc...

We present an end-to-end pipeline for the export of 3D scenes from content creation tools to a real-time rendering engine in an embeddable web-page, including a novel system for compression/decompression of textured polygonal meshes. We show that the compression/decompression outperforms the best state-of-the-art non-progressive alternative, especi...

This special issue addresses two important defining features of today’s society: ageingand digital technologies. In the 21st century, ageing has become one of the mostsignificant social transformations [27], as an increase in the ageing population ischanging much of the world and has become visibly real in many societies.Population ageing is occurr...

This paper addresses a gap in the Participatory Design (PD) literature, wherein more research on the long-term impact of design projects is warranted. This paper reflects on a 10-year study that intertwined ethnography and 2 PD projects in a community of older learners. Although the goal of our study was to design new digital technologies, the proc...

In the last decades, advances in interactive information technologies have facilitated collaborative fiction writing, which has become widespread and large-scale. This paper proposes a framework to analyze collaborative storytelling systems, made of a set of parameters divided into six conceptual areas. Four of them relate to the systems and two (p...

Older people (60+) are using digital technologies in growing numbers. Previous research has pointed out that digital game-based learning has positive effects on learning. Yet, older adults are often portrayed as passive receivers of digital information. Moreover, studies of digital games conducted with them have overlooked learning, focusing almost...

The benefits of applying technology to education have been often questioned. Learning through digital devices might imply reducing the children's physical interaction with the real world, when cognitive theories hold that such interaction is essential to develop abstract concepts in Mathematics or Physics. However, conflicting reports suggest that...

Mixed-reality environments allow to combine tangible interaction with digital feedback, empowering interaction designers to take benefits from both real and virtual worlds. This interaction paradigm is also being applied in classrooms for learning purposes. However, most of the times the devices supporting mixed-reality interaction are neither port...

Computational design is one of the most common tasks of immersive computer graphics projects, such as games, virtual reality and special effects. Layout planning is a challenging phase of architectural design, which requires optimization across several conflicting criteria. We present an interactive layout solver that assists designers in layout pl...

The creation and support of Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) has been quite challenging, as features required might not be straight-forward to implement and to integrate in a single application. Furthermore, ECAs as desktop applications present drawbacks for both developers and users; the former have to develop for each device and operating sy...

We present an intelligent embodied conversation agent with linguistic, social and emotional competence. Unlike the vast majority of the state-of-the-art conversation agents, the proposed agent is constructed around an ontology-based knowledge model that allows for flexible reasoning-driven dialogue planning, instead of using predefined dialogue scr...

This paper addresses a number of challenges HCI designers and researchers deal with when designing digital technologies for older people. We conducted a 5-year research-through-design study, which combined ethnography, participatory design and real-life evaluation, to explore the design and use of technologies aimed to enhance the social life of ol...

This paper analyzes pedestrians' behavioral patterns in the pedestrianized shopping environment in the historical center of Barcelona, Spain. We employ a Bluetooth detection technique to capture a large-scale dataset of pedestrians' behavior over a one-month period, including during a key sales period. We focused on comparing particular behaviors b...

This paper analyzes pedestrians' behavioral patterns in the pedestrianized shopping environment in the historical center of Barcelona, Spain. We employ a Bluetooth detection technique to capture a large-scale dataset of pedestrians' behavior over a one-month period, including during a key sales period. We focused on comparing particular behaviors b...

“Mobilities research thinks about a variety of things that move including humans, ideas and objects. It is particularly interested in how these things move in interconnected ways and how one may enable or hinder another” (Creswell 2011 p.552). Nowadays, it is increasingly common for members of the same family to be living in different regions, coun...

The book provides a systemic view of the state-of-the- art of Digital Game Based Learning (DGBL) across the lifespan, from age-specific game design requirements to technological devices that could overcome child and older adult difficulties in the use of DGBL technologies. Other topics include cross-generational digital game-based learning, workpla...

We present work in progress on an intelligent embodied conversation agent that is supposed to act as a social companion with linguistic and emotional competence in the context of basic and health care. The core of the agent is an ontology-based knowledge model that supports flexible reasoning-driven conversation planning strategies. A dedicated sea...

While most of today’s children, young people, and adults are both consumers and producers of digital content, very little is known about older people as digital content creators. Drawing on a three-year ethnographic study, this paper reports on the digital video production and appropriation of approximately 200 older people (aged 60–85). They gener...

Recent developments of video and sensing technology have led to large volumes of digital media data. Current media production rely on both video from the principal camera together with a wide variety of heterogeneous source of supporting data (photos, LiDAR point clouds, witness video camera, HDRI and depth imagery). Registration of visual data acq...

Recent developments of video and sensing technology have led to large volumes of digital media data. Current media production relies on videos from the principal camera together with a wide variety of heterogeneous source of supporting data [photos, light detection and ranging point clouds, witness video camera, high dynamic range imaging, and dept...

In this article, we introduce the method of urban association rules and its uses for extracting frequently appearing combinations of stores that are visited together to characterize shoppers' behaviors. The Apriori algorithm is used to extract the association rules (i.e., if -> result) from customer transaction datasets in a market-basket analysis....

In this article, we introduce the method of urban association rules and its uses for extracting frequently appearing combinations of stores that are visited together to characterize shoppers' behaviors. The Apriori algorithm is used to extract the association rules (i.e., if -> result) from customer transaction datasets in a market-basket analysis....

Understanding people’s consumption behavior while traveling between retail shops is essential for successful urban planning as well as determining an optimized location for an individual shop. Analyzing customer mobility and deducing their spatial distribution help not only to improve retail marketing strategies, but also to increase the attractive...

Locative narratives can implement different modes of coupling of the physical space and the narrative content, impacting how the user experiences and understands the story. Narrative causal relations are difficult to maintain when the user can freely explore the physical environment. In this paper we focus on multiple interlaced narratives, and the...

Virtual characters are an integral part of many games and virtual worlds. The ability to accurately synchronize lip movement to audio speech is an important aspect in the believability of the character. In this paper we propose a simple rule-based lip-syncing algorithm for virtual agents using the web browser. It works in real-time with live input,...

En este artículo se discute el concepto y la utilidad del objeto de aprendizaje, proponiendo que el factor clave es su uso, y no tanto sus características. Después, se revisan las actuales especificaciones de eLearning para la definición de estos objetos, indicando sus ventajas y desventajas. La especificación IMS Learning Design (LD) es analizada...

Telecenters take on a prominent role within the current information and communications technology (ICT) ecosystem in Brazil. They are seen by a great many as a key means to foster the digital inclusion of the older population in the country. This paper draws upon a rapid ethnographic study conducted with 78 older people in a center that teaches com...

We present work in progress on an intelligent embodied conversation agent in the basic care and healthcare domain. In contrast to most of the existing agents, the presented agent is aimed to have linguistic cultural, social and emotional competence needed to interact with elderly and migrants. It is composed of an ontology-based and reasoning-drive...

We present work in progress on an intelligent embodied conversation agent in the basic care and healthcare domain. In contrast to most of the existing agents, the presented agent is aimed to have linguistic cultural, social and emotional competence needed to interact with elderly and migrants. It is composed of an ontology-based and reasoning-drive...

Museums often suffer from so-called "hyper-congestion", wherein the number of visitors exceeds the capacity of the physical space of the museum. This can potentially deteriorate the quality of visitor's experience disturbed by other visitors' behaviors and presences. Although this situation can be mitigated by managing visitors' flow between spaces...

We claim that local e-services benchmarking studies summarized in indexes do little to enhance city managers' and academics' understanding of actual e-government performance, or to improve the e-services offered by cities. We undertook a different benchmarking approach, focused on learning best practices among cities, in late 2008 and early 2009. A...

To convey abstract meanings with visual elements is a frequent challenge in design. A popular vehicle of abstract meanings is the connotation of physical entities. Making designs demands a good deal of this knowledge, for the sake of novelty and appropriateness. We present two automatic knowledge extraction systems, namely VRAC and CDVS, for collec...

A typical high-end film production generates several terabytes of data per day, either as footage from multiple cameras or as background information regarding the set (laser scans, spherical captures, etc). This paper presents solutions to improve the integration of the multiple data sources, and understand their quality and content, which are usef...

Consumer-grade head-mounted displays (HMD) such as the Oculus Rift have become increasingly available for Virtual Reality recently. Their high degree of immersion and presence provokes usually amazement when first used. Nevertheless, HMDs also have been reported to cause adverse reactions such as simulator sickness. As their impact is growing, it i...

Exploring Older People interactions with Online Video Portals in Different Cultural Backgrounds

It is widely accepted that the field of Data Analytics has entered into the era of Big Data. In particular, it has to deal with so-called Big Graph Data, which is the focus of this paper. Graph Data is present in many fields, such as Social Networks, Biological Networks, Computer Networks, and so on. It is recognized that data analysts benefit from...

While older people tend to be regarded as actual, or potential, players of digital games within literature on game studies, human–computer interaction, and gerontechnology, they are also often considered nonavid users of digital technologies. This contradiction prompted us to conduct a literature review, which revealed (a) insufficient involvement...

A typical high-end film production generates several terabytes of data per day, either as footage from multiple cameras or as background information regarding the set (laser scans, spherical captures, etc). The EU project IMPART (impart.upf.edu) has been researching solutions that improve the integration and understanding of the quality of the mult...

A typical high-end film production generates several terabytes of data per day, either as footage from multiple cameras or as background information regarding the set (laser scans, spherical captures, etc). The EU project IMPART (impart.upf.edu) has been researching solutions that improve the integration and understanding of the quality of the mult...

Despite the widespread popularity of smart cities in policy and research fields, and the ever-increasing ageing population in urban areas, ageing issues have seldom been addressed in depth in smart city programs. The main focus has hitherto been on making physical environments 'older people friendly'. We review studies in environmental gerontology,...

In this paper we present the methods and techniques used to visualize the trajectory of the participants of a massive virtual regatta using a virtual globe in the web browser. The emergence of new web technologies, such as HTML5 and WebGL, have opened new avenues for visualizing and sharing 3D data. However, web-based visualization of big data is s...

In this paper, we present a web application for the hybrid visualisation of digital production Big Data. In a typical film or television production, several terabytes of data can be recorded per day, such as film footage from multiple cameras or background information regarding the set. Interactive visualisation of this multimodal data, integrating...

The main motivation of this paper is to provide a current state and a brief overview of animation on the web. Computer animation is used in many fields and it has seen a lot of development in the recent years. With the widespread use of WebGL and the age of powerful modern hardware available on small devices, 3D rendering on the browser is now beco...

Three playful wearable accessories incorporate design principles that promote individuality, natural interaction, ubiquity, and intimacy to encourage spontaneous open-ended social interaction in school-age children. The Web extra at https://youtu.be/LBBe8iDeFrs demonstrates Wearable Sound, an accessory that transforms your movements into sounds. Yo...

Over the last few years the use of mobile technologies has brought the formulation of location-based learning approaches shaping new or enhanced educational activities. Involving teachers in the design of these activities is important because the designs need to be aligned with the requirements of the specific educational settings. Yet, analysing t...

Speech prosody has traditionally been analyzed in terms of acoustic features. Although visual features have been shown to enhance linguistic processing, the conventional view is that facial and body gesture information in oral (non-signed) languages tends to be redundant and has the role of helping the hearer recover the meaning of an utterance. Th...

This short paper reports on the experiences of older people (60+) creating casual knowledge games through an Online Game Creation Platform (GCP). Despite the potential of games to contribute to the general wellbeing of older people by enabling them to enjoy later life, most of the efforts on research and development in Human-Computer Interaction fo...

Whilst older people are using technologies more and more, previous studies argue that researchers have largely focused on the design of assistive technologies, designing digital games that help older players to cope with age-related changes in functional abilities and portraying older people as passive receivers of digital information or remote obs...

Previous chapters present significant recent contributions around supporting authoring of learning designs, such as ScenEdit (Emin & Pernin, this volume Chapter 13), CADMOS (Katsamani, Retalis, & Boulakis, 2012) or OpenGLM (Derntl, this volume Chapter 12). Other multiple learning design tools have been also reported in the literature, as also expla...

Museums often suffer from so-called ‘hypercongestion’, wherein the number of visitors exceeds the capacity of the physical space of the museum. This can potentially be detrimental to the quality of visitors’ experiences, through disturbance by the behavior and presence of other visitors. Although this situation can be mitigated by managing visitors...

In this paper we present a system for progressive encoding, storage, transmission, and web based visualization of large point cloud datasets. Point cloud data is typically recorded on-set during a film production, and is later used to assist with various stages of the post-production process. The remote visualization of this data (on or off-set, ei...

Local governments play an important role as the main contact point for citizens and deliver many more and varied services than any other public administration. Nevertheless, the field of local e-government services (or local e-administration) lacks benchmarking methodologies and rigorous surveys. Existing e-government benchmarks mostly address the...

The teaching of journalism should consider the new professional contexts, where media convergence requires the editors to work following a collaboratively and integrated approach. The Integrated Journalism Workshop aims at responding to these needs by creating a simulated professional environment of an integrated editorial where students work in co...

Some educational innovation initiatives require practitioners to team up on the design of new learning activities. However, existing learning design tooling does not integrally support their tasks. Some tools enable authoring of designs, while other tools support sharing and commenting of learning design ideas, but none of them offers an integrated...

Interior space planning, as a creative part of the architectural design process, requires several conflicting criteria to be taken into consideration to find optimal solutions. This paper presents an automatic approach for suggesting floor plans to architects based on some dimensional and topological input constrains. We apply two different top-dow...

In recent years, 3D graphics has become an increasingly important part of the multimedia web experience. Following on from the advent of the X3D standard and the definition of a declarative approach to presenting 3D graphics on the web, the rise of WebGL has allowed lower level access to graphics hardware of ever increasing power. In parallel, remo...

Many digital production companies (whether for games, animated productions or digital cinema) now control and review their assets via web-based tools, due to the fast-moving ecosystem and rapid prototyping of web applications. The ability to access such tools via mobile interfaces is increasing in importance, particularly with the rise in power of...

In this paper the Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) included inside the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset is considered for head position tracking. While the Oculus is capable of mapping rotational movement to a virtual scene, recovering translational movement is not possible by default. In this study, we extract position data using a different app...

Recent research in the Technology-Enhanced Learning domain shows that m-learning activities can lead to positive effects in students’ motivation and engagement. Most of these activities are based on pervasive and ubiquitous computing that includes game elements. These gamified implementations are known as location-based games. However, the potentia...

Visits to museums and city tours have been part of higher and secondary education curriculum activities for many years. However these activities are typically considered “less formal” when compared to those carried out in the classroom, mainly because they take place in informal or non-formal settings. Augmented Reality (AR) technologies and smartp...

In many applications of 3D graphics, shadows increase the believability and perceived quality of a scene. With the increase in power of workstation hardware, high-quality soft shadowing has become relatively common in many 3D desktop applications. In parallel, recent years have seen an increase in the availability and use of mobile and tablet based...

This paper describes the design, implementation and results of a system to animate a virtual character to sign in International Sign (IS) By automatically parsing the input data, the system blends animations smoothly together in order to create a coherent and understandable presentation in sign language, with equal importance assigned to both hand...

Space, in terms of interior and exterior design, is one of the most important issues facing all architects. In particular the movement of people through sequences of spaces forms a large part of the circulation problem in architecture planning. Although several studies have applied network models on urban analysis to take advantage of graph based q...

Under the umbrella of ubiquitous technologies, many computational artifacts have been designed to enhance the learning experience in physical settings such as classrooms or playgrounds, but few of them focus on aiding orchestration. This paper presents a systematic evaluation of the signal orchestration system (SOS) used by students for a jigsaw ac...

This paper discusses the evocative power and play value of the Wearable Sounds Kit (WSK), a movement-to-sound interaction accessory. Whilst movement-to-sound interaction is attracting growing research attention in HCI, very little of it has been conducted in the context of free-play with children. This paper presents a participatory design study of...

Executive summary This deliverable gives an account of the objectives, procedures and results of the second (and final) round of evaluation of the WorthPlay platform, which enables older people to both create and play games. Four playful activities were designed and conducted in different situations of play with around 70 older people, with basic a...

With a growing ageing population and the advent of interactive TV (iTV), understanding how older people use iTV services is a timely and important task. Working towards this end, this paper reports on in situ conversations of, and observations with, almost 400 older people, with different levels of educational attainment and experience with ICTs, w...

In many applications of 3D graphics, shadows increase the believability and perceived quality of a scene. With the increase in power of workstation hardware, high-quality soft shadowing has become relatively common in many 3D desktop applications. In parallel, recent years have seen an increase in the availability and use of mobile and tablet based...

We propose a modified Entity Relationship (E-R) model, traditionally used for software engineering, to structure, store and share plot data. The flexibility of E-R modelling has been demonstrated by its decades of usage in a wide variety of situations. The success of the E-R model suggests that it could be useful for collaborating fiction authors,...

The combination of an educational technology standard for assessment with an open web map service (WMS) enables the creation of new types of questions to enhance the assessment of geographical skills. The potential of using multimedia maps allows for inclusion of new questions not possible with paper-based tests. By answering such questions and int...

This design narrative describes the use of QTI-Google Maps e-questionnaires to assess geography-related skills. The class was a group of 14-16 years-old students in the secondary school Duc de Montblanc in Rubí, Catalonia (Spain). The teacher of Geography and History was used to using a range of materials to teach geography: text book, paper-based...

In situ learning activities are recently becoming of higher interest in education because they facilitate contextualized learning experiences. A particular case is the creation of learning routes containing geo-located questions. In this line, teachers are increasingly more interested in getting involved in the design of such learning experiences a...

Mobile devices are increasingly being used in lifelong learning. However, while older learners are active members of the lifelong learning system, little research has been aimed at understanding how m-learning can provide them with successful learning experiences. In this paper we address the question if m-learning can foster the acceptance and upt...