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Online communities – Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability

Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking / Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology

Industry 4.0 and Health: Internet of Things, Big Data, and Cloud Computing for Healthcare 4.0

Social presence, or the feeling of being there with a “real” person, is a crucial component of interactions that take place in virtual reality. This paper reviews the concept, antecedents, and implications of social presence, with a focus on the literature regarding the predictors of social presence. The article begins by exploring the concept of social presence, distinguishing it from two other dimensions of presence—telepresence and self-presence. After establishing the definition of social presence, the article offers a systematic review of 222 separate findings identified from 150 studies that investigate the factors (i.e., immersive qualities, contextual differences, and individual psychological traits) that predict social presence. Finally, the paper discusses the implications of heightened social presence and when it does and does not enhance one’s experience in a virtual environment.

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A Systematic Review of Social Presence: Definition, Antecedents, and Implications.

A platform for secure monitoring and sharing of generic health data in the Cloud

Background: Australians in rural and remote areas live with far poorer health outcomes than those in urban areas. Telehealth services have emerged as a promising solution to narrow this health gap, as they improve the level and diversity of health services delivery to rural and remote Australian communities. Although the benefits of telehealth services are well studied and understood, the uptake has been very slow. Materials and Methods: To understand the underpinning issues, we conducted a literature review on barriers to telehealth adoption in rural and remote Australian communities, based on the published works of Australian clinical trials and studies. Results: This article presents our findings using a comprehensive barrier matrix. This matrix is composed of four stakeholders (governments, technology developers and providers, health professionals, and patients) and five different categorizations of barriers (regulatory, financial, cultural, technological, and workforce). We explain each cell...

Barriers for delivering telehealth in rural australia: a review based on Australian trials and studies.

Augmented Reality (AR) is a technology that allows users to view and interact in real time with virtual images seamlessly superimposed over the real world. AR systems can be used to create unique collaborative experiences. For example, co-located users can see shared 3D virtual objects that they interact with, or a user can annotate the live video view of a remote worker, enabling them to collaborate at a distance. The overall goal is to augment the face-to-face collaborative experience, or to enable remote people to feel that they are virtually co-located. In this special issue on collaboration in augmented reality, we begin with the visions of science fiction authors of future technologies that might significantly improve collaboration, then introduce research articles which describe progress towards these visions, finally we outline a research agenda discussing the work still to be done.

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Collaboration in Augmented Reality

There is currently a strong need for collaborative systems with which two or more participants interact over a distance on a task involving tangible artifacts (e.g., a machine, a patient, a tool). The present paper focuses on the specific category of remote-collaboration systems where hand gestures are used by a remote helper to assist a physically distant worker to perform manual tasks. Existing systems use a combination of video capturing, 2D monitors or 2D projectors, however displaying a video of the remote workspace and allowing helpers to gesture over the video does not provide helpers with sufficient understanding of the spatial relationships between remote objects and between their hands and the remote objects. In this paper we introduce our tele-presence Mixed Reality system for remote collaboration on physical tasks based on real-time capture and rendering of the remote workspace and of the helper's hands. We improve on previous 2D systems introducing 3D capturing and rendering, and exploiting the possibility offered by the use of real 3D data to increase the feeling of immersion offered by the system using head tracking, stereoscopic rendering, inter-occlusion handling and virtual shadowing. We performed initial usability test of our system to verify if users are satisfied with the spatial awareness the system provides.

3D helping hands: a gesture based MR system for remote collaboration

There is currently a strong need for collaborative augmented reality (AR) systems with which two or more participants interact over a distance on a mobile task involving tangible artefacts (e.g., a machine, a patient, a tool) and coordinated operations. Of interest to us is to design and develop an AR system for supporting a mobile worker involved in the maintenance/ repair of complex mining equipment. This paper presents HandsOnVideo, our on-going work towards a gesture based mobile AR system for remote collaboration. HandsOnVideo is designed and developed using a ­participatory design approach. Following this approach, we learnt that helpers found it natural to use their hands for pointing to objects and explaining procedures and that workers found it valuable to see the hands of the person guiding them remotely. On the other hand, we observed that this form of hand gesture interaction supported by HandsOnVideo resulted in network latency. This paper describes some of the design tradeoffs we came across during the design process and tested with representative end users. These tradeoffs will be further investigated as part of our research agenda.

Leila Alem

Papers

A platform for secure monitoring and sharing of generic health data in the Cloud

Barriers for delivering telehealth in rural australia: a review based on Australian trials and studies.

Collaboration in Augmented Reality

3D helping hands: a gesture based MR system for remote collaboration

HandsOnVideo: Towards a Gesture based Mobile AR System for Remote Collaboration