Exertion Games Lab

We are looking for emerging researchers as part of our Vice-Chancellor’s Fellowship Scheme (details below). We are therefore seeking emerging researchers interested in human-player interactions, in particular the intersection between HCI/Interaction design and games, especially play experiences that put the body in the centre of the experience. If interested, please contact us via email with the words “FELLOWSHIP” in uppercase in the subject field to discuss mutual research interests along with your CV well before the deadline below.

Vice-Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Scheme

RMIT University is now inviting applications from emerging researchers who have the potential to become high performing researchers.  Applications close:  4 September 2016.

These 3 year Fellowships are aimed at recent PhD graduates with up to 5 years’ experience post award of PhD (relative to opportunity) or those who will shortly satisfy the requirements for the award of PhD. Fellowship recipients will be located in Schools and undertaking research which is aligned with at least one of RMIT’s 8 Enabling Capability Platforms.

Benefits:

The Research and Innovation Portfolio will fund 100% of salary and on-costs (up to Academic level B/2) for a period of three years, plus a research support allowance of  $10,000 per annum for the three years.

The School will support the Fellow with:

•  a research only position, embedded in a high performing research team for at least the duration of their VC Postdoctoral Fellowship;
•  any relocation and visa costs;
•  workplanning which includes mentoring and research training and development planning;
•  full support for the appointee as per any academic staff member, including but not limited to, space and infrastructure sufficient for the position.

If you have any questions or queries regarding the Postdoctoral Fellowship Scheme, or the VC Outstanding Researcher Scheme more generally, please visit the website.

Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller is visiting the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain, in particular Narcis Pares from the Cognitive Media Technologies Group, who are famous for their interactive playground works, especially the interactive slide, on Fri, 22 Jul 2016.

Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller is giving a talk on “Designing Interactions for an Active Human Body” at RMIT Europe in Barcelona, Spain, on 21 Jul 2016, 1pm.

The Adventure paper by Floyd and Sarah has been accepted to Ubicomp’16, to be presented in Heidelberg, Germany, in September. Acceptance rate was 23.9%.

Summary: Based on an earthquake-interrupted Mt. Everest expedition, we propose seeing adventure-technology through 2 dimensions (expected-unexpected and instrumental-experiential) and identify four roles: technology as coach, rescuer, documentarian and mentor.

Mueller, F., Pell, S.J. Technology meets Adventure: Learnings from an Earthquake-Interrupted Mt. Everest Expedition. Ubicomp’16, ACM, 12 pages

Floyd’s radio interview on SYN‘s panorama program about mixed-reality games:

Floyd is going to be on the radio today talking about mixed-reality games and in particular Pokemon Go:

4.30 pm AEST on 90.7 FM for Panorama, SYN‘s flagship news and current affairs show.

We have a new book chapter out:

Mueller, F. Designing for the active human body in a digital-material world. In: Sarah Pink, Elisenda Ardèvol and Lanzeni, D. eds. Digital Materialities – Design and Anthropology, Bloomsbury, 2016. 137-156

Betty has won the Consensus Innovation Award!

Justin picked up the award last night in Sydney for Betty (while she is still in Beijing) and delivered the acceptance speech for her.

“The Consensus Innovation Awards recognise excellence in Australian and New Zealand companies. The stringent  judging process focuses on innovation, performance and potential. The 2016 award was presented to Betty Sargeant in recognition of the ‘rigorous research’ behind the design of her children’s educational story app ‘How Far is Up?’. The award also recognises the innovative nature, performance and the wider market potential of Betty’s work.”

Consensus is the organizer of Consensus Awards and was established in 1999 and runs 7 Awards Programs, all focused on identifying the most innovative technology designed and developed in Australia. Consensus have over 120 registered judges and an envious track record (9 out of 10) of identifying the best technologies that have gone on to perform exceptionally well internationally. They call it: “The Most Successful Awards Program in the World”.

Thank you everyone who participated in our Jogging at CHI SIG in San Jose, it was a wonderful day to run and talk about sports and HCI!

Mueller, F., Marshall, J.,Khot, R.A., Nylander, S., Tholander, J. Jogging at CHI. CHI 2016. SIG Special Interest Group (organizing). 4 pages

We will present the following works at DIS 2016 (ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems) in Brisbane, Australia:

Khot, R.A., Andres, J., Lai, J., Kaenel, J.v. and Mueller, F. Fantibles: Capturing Cricket Fan’s Story in 3D. DIS 2016. Long paper. 883-894

Marshall, J., Dancu, A. and Mueller, F. Interaction in Motion: Designing Truly Mobile Interaction. DIS 2016. Long paper. 215-228

Byrne, R. Designing Digital Vertigo Games. DIS 2016 Conference Companion Publication. Doctoral Consortium. 25-26

Cheklin, M., Mueller, F. and Greuter, S. Designing Mediated Nurturing Play with Dogs to Alleviate Workplace Stress. DIS 2016 Conference Companion Publication. 153-156

Together with Joe Marshall and Steve Benford, we published a new journal article in the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies:

Marshall, J., Mueller, F., Benford, S., Pijnappel, S. Expanding exertion gaming, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Volume 90, June 2016, Pages 1-13

We again have a great presence at CHI 2016 in San Jose, USA, with the following works:

Altimira, D., Mueller, F., Clarke, J., Lee, G., Billinghurst, M., Bartneck, C. Digitally Augmenting Sports: An Opportunity for Exploring and Understanding Novel Balancing Techniques. CHI 2016. Long paper. 11 pages.

Isbister, K., Mueller, F. Guidelines for the Design of Movement-Based Games and Their Relevance to HCI. Human Computer Interaction 30(3-4) 2015 journal article, presented at CHI 2016.

Mueller, F., Marshall, J.,Khot, R.A., Nylander, S., Tholander, J. Jogging at CHI. CHI 2016. SIG Special Interest Group (organizing). 4 pages

Bernhaupt, R., Mueller, F. Game User Experience Evaluation. CHI 2016. Course. 4 pages

Mueller, F., Garner, J., Pell, S.J., Raffe, W., Tamassia, M., Zamberta, F., Sargeant, B. Towards experiencing our bodies as digital play. CHI 2016. Submission to “Move to be Moved” Workshop.

Patibanda, R., Mueller, F., Leskovsek, M., Duckworth, J. BreathSenses: Towards Understanding Breathing Games.CHI 2016. Submission to the “Pervasive Play” Workshop.

Raffe, W., Zambetta, F., Tamassia, M., Mueller, F., Lee, Xiaodong, L. Reducing Perceived Waiting Time in Theme Park Queues via Multiplayer Augmented Reality. CHI 2016. Submission to the “Pervasive Play” Workshop.

Patibanda, R., Mueller, F., Leskovsek, M., Duckworth, J. BreathSenses: Towards Understanding Breathing Games. CHI 2016. Submission to the “Touch, Taste, & Smell User Interfaces: The Future of Multisensory HCI” Workshop.

Rich presents his vertigo work and Rob from the UBISS Summer School the work on HandyFeet at TEI’16 in Eindhoven, the Netherlands:

Byrne, R., Marshall, J., Mueller, F. Designing the Vertigo Experience: Vertigo as a Design Resource for Digital Bodily Play. TEI’16. ACM, 296-303

Mitchell, R., Fender, A. and Mueller, F. HandyFeet: Social Bodily Play Via Split Control of a Human Puppet’s Limbs. Work in Progress TEI’16. ACM, 506-511

Thanks to Chek’s time at the lab we have the following publication at SIGGRAPH Asia’s Symposium on Mobile Graphics and Interactive Applications:

Tan, C.T., Byrne, R., Lui, S., Liu, W. and Mueller, F. JoggAR: a mixed modality AR approach for technology-augmented jogging. SIGGRAPH Asia 2015 Mobile Graphics and Interactive Applications, ACM, 1-1.

We have a new publication from HCI International 2015 from Florian Lachner’s visit to the lab:

Lachner, F., von Saucken, C., Mueller, F., Lindemann, U. Cross-Cultural User Experience Design Helping Product Designers to Consider Cultural Differences. In: Rau, P.L.P. ed. Cross-Cultural Design Methods, Practice and Impact, Springer International Publishing, 2015, 58-70.