From Saturday, May 4th to Thursday, May 9th 2019 Dr. Christopher Collins and Dr. Rafael Veras from vialab will be attending the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Glasgow to promote our research activities. CHI is the premier international conference of Human-Computer Interaction, a place where researchers and practitioners gather from across the world to discuss the latest in interactive technology. The conference is highly selective, accepting only about 23% of submitted works in the full papers track. Both papers co-authored by vialab members received honorable mention awards, which are given to the top 4% of submissions in any given year.
Saliency Deficit and Motion Outlier Detection in Animated Scatterplots (Honorable mention)
Rafael Veras and Christopher Collins
Monday May 6th at 14:00 – Room: Lomod Auditorium
When a data visualization is animated, some points naturally pop out and others are less visible among the clutter. Through a large scale perceptual experiment, we determined which factors are most likely to cause important data elements to be seen or missed. The resulting model can be used to guide the design of visualizations to ensure important data points will be visible.
ActiveInk: (Th)Inking with Data (Honorable mention)
Hugo Romat, Nathalie Henry Riche, Ken Hinckley, Bongshin Lee, Caroline Appert, Emmanuel Pietriga, Christopher Collins.
Tuesday May 7th at 14:00 – Room: Hall1
Interacting with a pen to write thoughts and sketch ideas is a natural way to think through an analysis. In ActiveInk, we merge note-taking with novel ink-driven actions on data visualizations, such as circling a data item to highlight it, or crossing it out to remove it from view.
Other Contributions from Ontario Tech University
Members of Ontario Tech’s Games User Research Group also have a strong showing at CHI 2019!
Full papers:
Let’s Play Together: Adaptation Guidelines of Board Games for Players with Visual Impairment
Frederico da Rocha Tomé Filho, Pejman Mirza-Babaei, Bill Kapralos, Glaudiney Moreira Mendonça Junior.
Wednesday May 8th at 14:00 – Room: Gala
While board games have been rising in popularity in the past decade, they have been largely inaccessible for those with visual impairment. We investigated and evaluated various accessibility strategies to make these games playable to all users, regardless of visual ability, and propose a series of guidelines for the design and evaluation of accessible games.
Aggregated Visualization of Playtesting Data
Günter Wallner, Nour Halabi, Pejman Mirza-Babaei,
Wednesday May 8th at 16:00 – Room: Hall 2
Visualization techniques are currently being employed to help integrate quantitative and qualitative data. This paper proposes an aggregated visualization technique to simultaneously display mixed playtesting data. We evaluate the usefulness of the technique through interviews with professional game developers and compare it to a non-aggregated visualization.
Late-breaking works:
Artificial Playfulness: A Tool for Automated Agent-Based Playtesting
Samantha Stahlke, Atiya Nova, Pejman Mirza-Babaei
Tuesday May 7th at 10:20 am – Room: Hall 4
Playtesting is a crucial part of the game production process, but testing with human users can be incredibly expensive and time-consuming. Our research aims to address these challenges with PathOS – a prototype framework for simulating player navigation in games through the use of AI. PathOS gives developers a cost-effective option to coarsely predict player behaviour, allowing them to pursue informed iteration on their work earlier in the design process.
FRVRIT – A Tool for Full Body Virtual Reality Game Evaluation
Daniel MacCormick, Alain Sangalang, Jackson Rushing, Ravnik Singh Jagpal, Pejman Mirza-Babaei, Loutfouz Zamaan,
Tuesday May 7th at 10:20 am – Room: Hall 4
Testing and evaluating how players interact with VR games often requires watching back hours of footage and manually noting down observations. FRVRIT provides developers a way of recording entire VR sessions and visualizing them at a glance, in their entirety.
Course:
User Experience (UX) Research in Games
Instructors: Lennart Nacke, Pejman Mirza-Babaei, Anders Drachen,
Thursday May 9th at 9:00 am to 16:00 – Room: Castle 1 Crown