Congratulations to Neha Rani and Nanjie (Jimmy) Rao for their paper acceptances to HCII 2021 in Washington DC! Read more about the papers below:

User Perception of Wearables in Everyday Learning Contexts: The Impact of Prior Device Experience by Neha Rani and Sharon Lynn Chu

Wearable devices are typically strapped on the body of users and allow the user to have the devices available constantly to assist in a variety of situations in daily life. While in formal education the type of wearable to be used is mostly the decision of the instructor or school administrators, for informal learning, it is the choice of users. This makes the investigation of people’s preferences for wearable form factors to support informal learning in daily life an important question. Differences between users with and without wearable experience will help designers understand why certain wearable devices are more preferred and the role of experience in people’s attitudes. Our survey based exploration shows that prior experience influences the choice for wearables even though wearables forms are constantly evolving, and specific wearable types may be more suitable for anyone specific learning scenario.

Flexible Low-Cost Digital Puppet System by Nanjie Rao and Sharon Lynn Chu

Puppet-based systems have been developed to help children engage in storytelling and pretend play in much prior literature. Many different approaches have been proposed to implement such puppet-based storytelling systems, and new systems are still routinely published, indicating the continued interest in the topic not only in the area of interactive storytelling, but also across other domains like child-computer interaction, learning technologies, and the broader HCI community. This paper first covers approaches used for puppet-based storytelling system, and then proposes a flexible low-cost approach to puppet-based storytelling system using a combination of vision- and sensor-based tracking. Results are discussed from a perception study that evaluates the performance of our system output. The novelty of our approach does not rely on any single part of the system but exists in the connections that glue every part together and takes advantage of the strength of every part. This flexibility warrants easy upgrades when substituting new parts into the system. This helps to open up the design and implementation space of future interactive narrative authoring tools.