Archive 25 October, 2020

John Waterworth and Ingvar Tjostheim presented the paper: “Integrating the world of presence theory: Illusion, pretence, attending, and pretending” at the 18th Conference of the International Society for Presence Research on Friday, October 23rd.

Just out, this new book by Kei Hoshi and John Waterworth, in the Springer HCI Series!

Yesterday, Ingvar Tjostheim did a great job presenting our paper “Virtual Tourism in a Game Environment: Untangling Judged Affordances and Sense of Place” at the virtual version of HCII 2020 (which was to have been held in Copenhagen)!

This week we attended (remotely) the BFHA2020 conference in Zagreb, presenting a paper entitled: Not “the computer” but “the place”: designing and evaluating future ambient spaces for improved quality of life in the elderly.

Somaye Rahini and Ines Ayed have been with us for the last few months, on short-term PhD studentship visits. Now they have finished their time here: Somaye has returned to the University of Teheran in Iran, and Ines will return to Palma and the University of the Balearics.

Somaye worked mostly on designing a Virtual Human Resources Development (VHRD) social network, including building an interactive prototype for testing her ideas. She also completed a paper that has now been submitted to a major journal in the area.

Ines has been developing games aimed at encouraging older people to exercise and improve their balance, using the Kinect platform. She made a set of movement games, with and without a cognitive puzzle element, investigating how this factor affects motivation and the sense of presence in the game. We are currently testing them with our Senior-IT group in Åsele.

We wish Somaye and Ines all the best for 2020 and their future careers!