Wallace Lages

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Assistant) at Northeastern University

The Interactions website (interactions.acm.org) hosts a stable of bloggers who share insights and observations on HCI, often challenging current practices. Each issue we'll publish selected posts from some of the leading and emerging voices in the field.

Audio Augmented Reality (AAR) applications are gaining traction, especially for entertainment purposes. To that extent, the current study explored its use and effectiveness in enhancing art gallery visitors’ experiences. Four paintings were selected and sonified using the Jython algorithm to produce computer generated music (Basic AAR); the audio w...

Immersive entertainment is an important driver of mixed reality platforms. As technology becomes better and cheaper, this will spark the next major shift in digital entertainment. We identify nine research topics on immersive entertainment across theoretical-scientific, creative, systems, and social dimensions. For each topic, we discuss possible r...

The next major shift in digital entertainment will be the wide adoption of mixed reality platforms. Although owners of mixed reality devices are still a minority today, immersive systems are quickly getting better and cheaper. We identity eight research topics on immersive entertainment and discuss possible research directions that can lead to adva...

With the continuing development of affordable immersive virtual reality (VR) systems, there is now a growing market for consumer content. The current form of consumer systems is not dissimilar to the lab-based VR systems of the past 30 years: the primary input mechanism is a head-tracked display and one or two tracked hands with buttons and joystic...

With the continuing development of affordable immersive virtual reality (VR) systems, there is now a growing market for consumer content. The current form of consumer systems is not dissimilar to the lab-based VR systems of the past 30 years: the primary input mechanism is a head-tracked display and one or two tracked hands with buttons and joystic...

In collaborative tasks, it is often important for users to understand their collaborator’s gaze direction or gaze target. Using an augmented reality (AR) display, a ray representing the collaborator’s gaze can be used to convey such information. In wide-area AR, however, a simplistic virtual ray may be ambiguous at large distances, due to the lack...

Many cases in which augmented reality would be useful in everyday life requires the ability to access to information on the go. This means that interfaces should support user movement and also adjust to different physical environments. Prior research has showed that spatial adaptation can reduce the effort required to manage windows when walking an...

A promising feature of wearable augmented reality devices is the ability to easily access information on the go. However, designing AR interfaces that can support user movement and also adjust to different physical environments is a challenging task. We present an interaction system for AR windows that uses adaptation to automatically perform level...

Mobile augmented reality may eventually replace our smartphones as the primary way of accessing information on the go. However, current interfaces provide little support to walking and to the variety of actions we perform in the real world. To achieve its full potential, augmented reality interfaces must support the fluid way we move and interact i...

Technostress is an emerging and significant psychological phenomenon associated with the use of technology. As humans increasingly encounter computational technology on a daily basis, there is a need to manage the anxieties and tensions that can result from these interactions. Using the lens of critical design, we created a design probe to explore...

Physical walking is consistently considered a natural and intuitive way to acquire viewpoints in a virtual environment. However, research findings also show that walking requires cognitive resources. To understand how this tradeoff affects the interaction design for virtual environments; we evaluated the performance of 32 participants, ranging from...

Better Hands (2017) is an interactive installation that explores the limits and the role of tools in the creative process. It questions the nature of authorship by bringing the interface closer to the body, while empowering it with embedded agency. The artwork invites us to reflect on the effect of modern technology on the basic act of creation and...

We describe how self-production systems theory can be applied in the design of new creative interfaces. By modeling the interface as an organizationally closed system, we can support creative agency while still allowing collaboration with the user. Although in this approach the interactor no longer solely determines the output, both the user and in...

We present two novel redirection techniques to enable real walking in large virtual environments (VEs) using only “room-scale” tracked spaces. The techniques, called Bookshelf and Bird, provide narrative-consistent redirection to keep the user inside the physical space, and require the user to walk to explore the VE. The underlying concept, called...

In this work we report our ongoing investigation on how natural interaction can improve player experience in collaborative virtual reality games. In particular we discuss bare-hand interaction and natural locomotion as means to reduce learning curve, improve immersion and allow non-verbal communication. Our findings concur with known benefits of na...

In this paper we present the design process of Capsule, an inertial input device to support 3D manipulation of biological datasets. Our motivation is to improve the scientist's workflow during the analysis of 3D biological data such as proteins, CT scans or neuron fibers. We discuss the design process and possibilities for this device.

In this paper we present a technique to support collaborative 3D manipulation. Our approach is based on two or more users jointly specifying the parameters of each transformation using a point, a ray, and a scalar value. We discuss how this concept can be coupled with a camera system to create a scalable technique that can accommodate both parallel...

This paper describes the design and evaluation of an alerting vest for construction workers. Four different alerts and modalities were compared through an empirical study. We measured the response time to different alerts while the users performed three distinct tasks. We found that the modality of each alert has a significant effect on time and al...

We present a novel virtual musical instrument interface based on in-air 3D gestures called the Interval Player. Instead of specifying absolute notes, the user specifies the melodic interval between the most recent note and the next one. The non-dominant hand is used to specify chords for harmony. We discuss the principles and rationale used in the...

Open in 2013, the Interactive Space of Life Sciences is located in the city of Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil. Integrated to the Museum of Natural Sciences and Botanical Garden of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, it represents an innovative environment where technology and art are combined with conventional education tools such as an...

Behavioral models are used in games and computer graphics for realistic simulation of massive crowds. In this paper, we present a GPU based implementation of Reynolds [1987] algorithm for sim-ulating flocks of birds and propose an extension to consider en-vironment self occlusion. We performed several experiments and the results showed that the pro...

Behavioral models have been used in the entertainment industry to increase the realism in the simulation of large groups of individuals. Unfortunately, the classical models can be very compute-intensive when very large groups are considered, reducing its applicability in games and other interactive systems. In this article we explore both search sp...

Multiple view rendering is a common problem for applications where multiple users visualize a common dataset, as in multi-player games and collaborative engineering tools. For a system to be able to render a large number of views at interactive rates efficiently, parallel processing is an attractive technique. In this work, we present the implement...

We present an architecture for rendering multiple views efficiently on a cluster of GPUs. The original scene is sampled by virtual cameras which are used later to reconstruct the desired views. We show that this image-based approach can be very scalable and support rendering at interactive rates.