Extensive sitting is unhealthy; thus, countermeasures are needed to react to the ongoing trend toward more prolonged sitting. A variety of studies and guidelines have long addressed the question of how we can improve our sitting habits. Nevertheless, sitting time is still increasing. Here, smart devices can provide a general overview of sitting habits for more nuanced feedback on the user’s sitting posture. Based on a literature review (N=223), including publications from engineering, computer science, medical sciences, electronics, and more, our work guides developers of posture systems. There is a large variety of approaches, with pressure-sensing hardware and visual feedback being the most prominent. We found factors like environment, cost, privacy concerns, portability, and accuracy important for deciding hardware and feedback types. Further, one should consider the user’s capabilities, preferences, and tasks. Regarding user studies for sitting posture feedback, there is a need for better comparability and for investigating long-term effects.
2021
Don’t Catch It: An Interactive Virtual-Reality Environment to Learn About COVID-19 Measures Using Gamification Elements
Christian Krauter*, Jonas Vogelsang*, Aimée Sousa Calepso, Katrin Angerbauer, and Michael Sedlmair * contributed equally
The world is still under the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even though vaccines are deployed as rapidly as possible, it is still necessary to use other measures to reduce the spread of the virus. Measures such as social distancing or wearing a mask receive a lot of criticism. Therefore, we want to demonstrate a serious game to help the players understand these measures better and show them why they are still necessary. The player of the game has to avoid other agents to keep their risk of a COVID-19 infection low. The game uses Virtual Reality through a Head-Mounted-Display to deliver an immersive and enjoyable experience. Gamification elements are used to engage the user with the game while they explore various environments. We also implemented visualizations that help the user with social distancing. * Both authors contributed equally to this research.
2019
Notification in VR: The Effect of Notification Placement, Task and Environment
Rufat Rzayev, Sven Mayer, Christian Krauter, and Niels Henze
In Proc. Symp. Computer-Human Interaction in Play, Oct 2019
Virtual reality (VR) is commonly used for entertainment applications but is also increasingly employed for a large number of use cases such as digital prototyping or training workers. Here, VR is key to present an immersive secondary world. VR enables experiences that are close to reality, regardless of time and place. However, highly immersive VR can result in missing digital information from the real world, such as important notifications. For efficient notification presentation in VR, it is necessary to understand how notifications should be integrated in VR without breaking the immersion. Thus, we conducted a study with 24 participants to investigate notification placement in VR while playing games, learning, and solving problems. We compared placing notifications using a Head-Up Display, On-Body, Floating, and In-Situ in open, semi-open, and closed VR environments. We found significant effects of notification placement and task on how notifications are perceived in VR. Insights from our study inform the design of VR applications that support digital notifications.