Abstract

Abstract
Because of terminology mismatches, health consumers frequently face difficulties while searching the Web for health information. Difficulties arise in query formulation but also in understanding the retrieved documents. In this work we analyze how documents' readability affects users' comprehension and how both affect the retrieval performance, measured in different ways. In addition, we analyze how performance measures relate with each other. For this purpose we have conducted a laboratory user study with 40 participants. We found that readability is essential for a document to be at least partially relevant and that it becomes even more important if the document has medico-scientific terminology. Moreover, the relevance of a document to a specific user highly depends on its comprehension. In lay queries we found the medical accuracy of users' answers is related to the session's relevance assessments. This shows that users can, at least in part, relate their relevance assessments with the medical accuracy of the documents. On the other hand, this relationship does not exist with medico-scientific queries. © 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to Association for Computing Machinery.

Abstract
Museums promote cultural experiences through exhibits and the stories behind them. Nevertheless, museums are not always designed to engage and interest young audiences, especially teenagers. Throughout this paper, we discuss teenagers as an important group to be considered within the Children-Computer Interaction field, and we report some techniques on designing with teens, in particular, arguing that participatory design methods can involve teenagers in the design process of technology for museums. For this purpose, we conceptualized, designed and deployed a co-design activity for teenagers (aged 15–17), where teenagers together with a researcher jointly created and designed a medium fidelity prototype. For this case study, participants were divided into groups and invited to think and create games and story plots for a selected museum. All the prototypes were made by the participants with the support and guidance of the researcher and the Aurasma software, an augmented reality tool. © 2019, ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.

Abstract
Virtual Reality (VR) has been recently gaining interest from researchers and companies, contributing to the development of the associated technologies that aim to transport its users to a virtual environment by the stimulation of their senses. Technologies such as Head-Mounted Displays (HMD), capable of presenting 360° video in 3D, are becoming affordable and, consequently, more common among the average consumer, potentiating the creation of a market for VR experiences. The purpose of this study is to measure the influence of (a) video format (2D/monoscopic vs 3D/stereoscopic), (b) sound format (2D/stereo vs 3D/spatialized), and (c) gender on users’ sense of presence and cybersickness, while experiencing a VR application using an HMD. Presence and cybersickness were measured using questionnaires as subjective measures. Portuguese versions of the Igroup Presence Questionnaire for presence and the Simulator Sickness Questionnaire for cybersickness were used. Results revealed no statistically significant differences between (a) VIDEO and (b) SOUND variables on both senses of presence and cybersickness. When paired with (a) VIDEO, the independent variable (c) Gender showed significant differences on almost all subscales of presence. Results suggest that the widely acknowledged differences in spatial ability between genders were a major factor contributing to this outcome. © 2017 Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany

Abstract

Abstract
New virtual reality technologies allow the user to gain a greater sense of presence in virtual environments. One of the areas where these technologies can have a major impact is the area of games that allow users to explore these environments and interact with them by receiving feedback from their actions in real time. The present study aimed to evaluate if the use of physiological signals to update the virtual environment in realtime could be used to increase the feeling of presence. To perform this study, an experimental study was designed based on a game that allowed the use of physiological data to calculate the participant's arousal in real-time and, based on that, modify certain elements of the virtual environment where the participants were asked to fulfill a task. With the analysis of the data obtained, it was possible to verify that the use of biofeedback did not reveal statistically significant differences for the variables tested, however, it can be concluded that the use of biofeedback improves some subscales of presence, being the users with more experience in games and more computer knowledge susceptible to such changes. © 2018 IEEE.