On May 20th HTI will host the joint meeting of the Netherlands and Flanders DiGRA chapters. The program will start at 12:30 and end with a short visit at the GameXPLab and a drink around 17:00. This meeting will also have a new feature. At the end of the meeting there will be a poster session during the informal drink. Anyone who notifies the organization beforehand will be able to show his or her work in the form of a poster. 

Progam:

13:00-13:30 Prisoners’ Media Use as a Coping Style: Game Play as an Atypical Mode of Escapism
Wannes Ribbens & Steven Malliet, K.U.Leuven & University of Antwerp

13:30-14:00 Putting Brands into Play: How Player Experiences Influence the effectiveness of In-Game Advertising
Laura Herrewijn & Karolien Poels, University of Antwerp

14:15-14:45 How to Win Friends – Gaming as a Socially Situated Experience
Yvonne de Kort Eindhoven University of Technology

14:45-15:15 Kungfu Kitchen: Digital Games for Physical Therapy 
Luc Geurts & Vero Vanden Abeele e-Media Lab, GROUP T - Leuven Engineering College (Association K.U.Leuven) 

Register

There is no entrance fee, but registration is required in order for us to estimate attendance. To register, please visit the following webpage: http://register.digra.gameonderzoek.be

Getting there:

A description on how to get at the meeting at HTI can be found here. 

Hope to see you there!
Bob de Schutter, Marinka Copier, Wouter van den Hoogen and Wijnand IJsselsteijn

The Workshop "User-Centered Evaluation of Recommender Systems and Their Interfaces 2" will take place at the 5th ACM Recommender Systems conference (RecSys) 2011, Chicago

Research on "Human-Recommender Interaction" is scarce. Algorithm optimization and off-line testing using measures like RMSE are dominant topics in the RecSys community, but theorizing about consumer decision processes and measuring user satisfaction in online tests is less common. Researchers in Marketing and Decision-Making have been investigating consumer choice processes in great detail, but only sparingly put this knowledge to use in technological applications. Human-Computer Interaction has been focusing on the usability of interfaces for ages, but does not seem to link research on consumer choice and recommender system interfaces.

Website: http://ucersti.ieis.tue.nl/ or see the Call for Papers

The format will be a half-day workshop with paper and poster presentations, and will be concluded by a panel discussion on "Recommender system evaluation: creating a unified, cumulative science". This panel discussion will be introduced by Jo Konstan and Bart Knijnenburg.

Topics :

• Design and evaluation of recommender system user interfaces
• Preference elicitation methods and Decision Making research
• Applications of psychological theory and models in Recommender systems
• User-adaptive recommender interfaces
• Qualitative evaluation of recommender systems such as case studies and think-aloud evaluations
• Quantitative evaluation of recommender systems such as controlled experiments and field trials
• User-recommender interaction measurement techniques such as questionnaires and process data analysis
• Design guidelines for recommender systems
• user acceptance of recommender systems
• user-privacy issues of recommender systems

Organizing committee :
Martijn Willemsen, Eindhoven University of Technology, M.C.Willemsen@tue.nl
Dirk Bollen, Eindhoven University of Technology, D.G.F.M.Bollen@tue.nl
Michael Ekstrand, University of Minnesota, ekstrand@cs.umn.edu

An alarming increase of people in Western societies is feeling lonely, having no one to share important matters with, or even living entirely alone. This loneliness has profound negative effects on mental and physical well-being. In this light, developing technologies that can support people in their struggle to overcome loneliness is of great importance. In the article, the authors present two clever experiments to test if the sound of each other’s heartbeats can bring people closer together. The article has received much attention and is well received. See for instance a science daily article. 

Authors: Joris H. Janssen, Jeremy N. Bailenson, Wijnand A. IJsselsteijn, and Joyce H.D.M. Westerink

During the experiment participants wore a sophisticated helmet displaying a virtual world to them in which they were fully immersed and had complete freedom to walk and look around. This enabled the researchers to carefully measure and analyze their behavior when hearing someone else’s heartbeat. Statistical analyses of this behavior, together with questions the participants answered afterwards, show a clear pattern: hearing someone else’s heartbeat is a strong intimate signal. Therefore, communicating biosignals like heartbeats could help us bring people closer together and reduce loneliness. This opens up a future in which we can augment our natural emotion communication by new technologies that share the biosignals carrying our emotions.

The paper is currently the focus paper on the website for IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/T-AFFC.2010.13

2010-04-01

In the Intermediair of april 2010 an article about 3DTV was included for which HTI has contributed.

For the article see: http://www.intermediair.nl/epaper/2010/13/index.html#/37/

Author: Daniël Lakens

Although it is generally accepted that colors carry meaning, experimental research about individual, situational and cultural differences in the meaning of colors is scarce. Many countries have national colors that are used to represent the nation, such as when sport teams dress in the colors of their nation during international competitions to indicate their country of origin. Although probably all people in The Netherlands know that orange is the Dutch national color, the current research investigated whether orange is also psychologically meaningful for the Dutch. It turns out that the more people identify with The Netherlands, the more they like the color orange. 

Furthermore, the color orange was evaluated more positively when it was salient that orange is the Dutch national color, such as during the European soccer championship, compared to before or after the championship. Similarly, when people are asked to think back to a time when they identified with The Netherlands, they liked the color orange better than people who were asked to think back to a time when they did not identify with The Netherlands. Companies can use the increased positivity of orange in times when the salience of orange as perceptual representation of The Netherlands is strong to their advantage, for example by selling orange versions of their products, using orange in their advertisements, or if their company logo is orange, by displaying it more prominently when international sport events are in progress. Consumers should perhaps think twice about buying a new orange car during the European championship, because they might regret the purchase several months later.

Lakens, D. (in press). Orange as a Perceptual Representation of the Dutch Nation: Effects on Perceived National Identification and Color Evaluation. European Journal of Social Psychology.