Exploring true multi-user multimodal interaction over a digital table

Mixed Reality (MR) is the next evolution of human interacting with the computer as MR has the ability to combine the physical environment and digital environment and making them coexist with each other. Interaction is still a huge research area in Augmented Reality (AR) but very less in MR, this is due to current advanced MR display techniques still not robust and intuitive enough to let the user to naturally interact with 3D content. New techniques on user interaction have been widely studied, the advanced technique in interaction when the system able to invoke more than one input modalities. Multimodal interaction undertakes to deliver intuitive multiple objects manipulation with gestures. This paper discusses the multimodal interaction technique using gesture and speech which the proposed experimental setup to implement multimodal in the MR interface. The real hand gesture is combined with speech inputs in MR to perform spatial object manipulations. The paper explains the implementation stage that involves interaction using gesture and speech inputs to enhance user experience in MR workspace. After acquiring gesture input and speech commands, spatial manipulation for selection and scaling using multimodal interaction has been invoked, and this paper ends with a discussion.

The rise of crowdfunding websites such as Kickstarter and IndieGogo have had a significant impact on the business of Industrial Design. During the last ten years, industrial designers have been able to raise capital from online investors and donors to kick start their own projects. This phenomenon also had a significant impact on Industrial Design education. Students are now able to use these online platforms to test their ideas and eventually crowdfund their own projects after graduation.Connecting directly with potential investors or donors is critical for the success of any design project. Popular platforms such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo allow designers to launch video campaigns that investors and donors can watch, evaluate and decide what type of project they want to support.Industrial Design students and professionals typically rely on a combination of digital tools such as computer imagery/animations, 3D printed models and prototypes to communicate their ideas. Launching a video campaign online requires knowledge of all these tools plus basic understanding of video production, marketing, branding and entrepreneurship. Since the goal of any video campaign is to raise funds from investors, the campaign has to be engaging and easy to understand.This case study will discuss the challenges and present solutions utilized by Industrial Design students to engage their online audiences. Students will use a blog to present a combined business and design plans. This research paper describes how Industrial Design students deliver campaign videos to promote their own brand.KeywordsCrowdfundingInvestorDonorIndustrial Design

With the continuous ageing of the population, the demand for different healthcare services is increasing at a fast pace. At the same time, the number of caregivers is limited and the cost of well-being is increasing. Therefore, there is a recognized need for technologies that assist elderly people in their daily activities and ensure their safety along with their social integration while maintaining a higher degree of independence. One important aspect in the development of such technologies is their easy acceptance by elderly users. Traditional human-machine interfaces have always represented a barrier for the acceptance of new devices by non-technical people in general and by elderly or people with special needs in particular. In this paper, we propose a multimodal interface designed to match the requirements of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) systems and to fulfill the needs of elderly people who are the main users of this interface. The interface is multilingual, it supports two languages (English and Romanian) and it can process both speech and gesture commands. The interface is developed using HTML5, JavaScript, CSS3 and integrates Google Speech Service along with other services. It is able to adapt itself to any screen size and to work flawlessly across different platforms. The interface was developed and tested within the Artificial intelligent ecosystem for self-management and sustainable quality of life in AAL (CAMI) project. Both the interface and the results of laboratory tests are presented in this paper.

Speech recognition for command entry in multimodal interaction

We describe our approach to teaching the MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture for GUI applications. Swing adopts MVC at component level. We use it as a case study to illustrate features of MVC and also help students learn to use the tool for programming projects. To encourage them to see beyond a specific tool, we assign students a project to build a domain-specific framework for GUI applications using MVC at application level. This project allows students to learn hands on the MVC architecture as well as other design techniques in a new context. Our two-semester experience shows that a tool-based case study with a follow-up effort as such is productive in teaching practical design techniques.

Amidst a rapid global proliferation of digital social media, Japanese youth have been adopting, adapting, and developing a diversity of multilingual computer mediated communication (CMC) practices on a variety of digital platforms. Previous research has pointed to commonalities in these practices with the practices of youth in other locales, but also to unique localized ways that Japanese youth communicate across digital media. This quasi-ethnographic case study was designed to explore English language learners’ multilingual CMC practices and perceptions from within a mediumsized private regional university in central Japan, and to point to pedagogical affordances that might lead to the development of symbolic competence. The project operates within a social constructivist paradigm and employs a theoretical approach largely consistent with cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), but also drawing upon other theoretical traditions. Data were collected using narrative frames and field notes gathered during long-term participant observation that constituted insider research at the research site. The rationale for this study comes from the researcher’s interest in exploring ways that new technological affordances can best be used to enhance educational outcomes in a Japanese higher education context. Beyond the design affordances and constraints of various CMC technologies, myriad local factors and cultural assumptions were seen to contribute to the ‘cultures of use’ that inform students’ multilingual and multimodal interactions through various media. This research revealed that students rapidly develop new multilingual CMC practices through their interactions with their peers after entering university and returning from study abroad. A significant lack of broader media literacy, however, was seen to impede the development of symbolic competence. Pedagogical recommendations are offered to overcome this and other barriers to the development of symbolic competence.

The aim of this study was to elucidate the antecedents of purchase intentions of the secondhand market customers. In this regard, the data was collected from Kurdistan region of Iraq to test the impacts of antecedents. Collected data was composed of validity and reliability analysis. Regression analysis was used to test the impacts. Results reveal that price has significant negative impact on the purchase intention while product quality, safety, and serviceability had significant positive impact on the purchase intentions. Lastly, it was observed that oil consumption didn’t have a significant impact on the purchase intentions of the customers.

The age-related changes in hematopoiesis (ARCH) project is part of the Innovative Training Network (ITN) of the Marie-Sklodowska Curie Actions (MSCA) program, which provides doctorate training of excellence based on the exchange of ideas and competencies from the academic and private sectors.1 The ARCH project intends to outline hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) alterations with aging, how hematopoietic cell individuality is controlled at the transcriptional and epigenetic levels in normal hematopoiesis and in leukemias, and understand the crosstalk between intrinsic and extrinsic indications that support the proliferation of preleukemic and leukemic cells within the hematopoietic niche. We are 15 PhD students funded by this network, based around Europe, and our common aim is to understand functional changes in the hematopoietic system with age, how these changes link to the development of age-associated diseases and in parallel work towards the development of new treatments.2 Our projects kicked off just when the severe acute respiratory coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) emerged. Two and a half years later, SARS-CoV-2 continues to infect millions of people and has taken the lives of at least 6 million people worldwide.3 The COVID-19 outbreak brought along social isolation and feelings of uncertainty to everyone around the world, including doctorate students.4,5 Ironically, our projects have been more relevant than ever, as the pandemic has highlighted the important relationship between age-related changes in hematopoiesis and disease severity. Below, we aim to discuss the timeline of the ARCH project throughout the pandemic and how we managed to courageously pull through the hardships of doing research during a global pandemic within different settings (academia/institutes and industry). We provide recommendations to future PhD students on how to manage their PhD projects during global emergencies.

In this paper we present our considerations for the design, development and evaluation of Web multimodal interfaces using as example the analysis and the results of three Case Studies. Two usability methods were applied in these Case Studies as part of our approach for Web multimodal interfaces design. The objective is to smooth the progress of the design activities provided by the Multimodal Web Approach (MMWA) recovering Design Rationale from previous projects and improving the usability and user experience in the multimodal interaction. From the experience got performing three case studies with the MMWA, we derive a general framework for design of communication in Web Multimodal Interfaces.

In order to expand on the scope of research on partnership governance, this study explored the impact of relationship trust, stakeholder environmental awareness, and regenerative innovation on environmental performance. The study participants were primarily employees of legitimate public waste disposal and treatment facilities in the six special municipalities of Taiwan (including domestic and overseas facilities). The investigation was conducted via a questionnaire survey. A total of 1000 questionnaires were distributed and 550 were recovered, of which 539 were valid, indicating an effective recovery rate of 53.9%. Data analysis was conducted by structural equation modeling. The empirical results showed that relationship trust had a significant and positive impact on stakeholders’ environmental awareness, which, in turn, had a significant and positive impact on regenerative innovation. Relationship trust had no direct and significant impact on regenerative innovation. Hence, the impact of relationship trust on regenerative innovation is mediated by stakeholders’ environmental awareness. The results also showed that regenerative innovation had a significant and positive impact on environmental management performance, and no significant impact on environmental operational performance. Hence, the impact of regenerative innovation on environmental management performance is not mediated by environmental operational performance.

This paper describes the use of an objective fuzzy approach for fast and accurate vision‐based inspection. An inspection problem faced by a Canadian automotive parts manufacturer is being used as a case study. The problem is related to a vision system that is being operated to confirm the placement of metal fastening clips on a structural member that supports a truck dash panel. The manufacturer was interested in identifying the presence or absence of metal clips inserted by a robot arm. It took the manufacturer over 8 months to tune its commercial machine vision system to detect missing clips and yet the accuracy and efficiency of the system are being questioned. Five different universities across Canada have been working in parallel on this problem over a time span of 2 years. To this end, we developed an efficient fuzzy model after trying various statistical approaches. The proposed model properly identifies all the images in a database containing 1910 images. The robustness of the fuzzy model is confirmed by its strong performance on the entire database.

Recent design studies have advocated how design practices enhance innovation in various fields. Indeed, the latest case study discovered that industrial designers can contribute even in natural science research. On the other hand, the majority of R&D management scholars and practitioners have long overlooked the value of collaboration between R&D engineers and industrial designers. To fill the gap, in this study, we test the link between an enrollment of industrial designers in inventing activities and their impacts on inventing outcomes using patent applications to Japan Patent Office from a Japanese electronics manufacturer. By connecting each inventor's individual affiliation information collected from the design patent, we constructed 75,932 invention-level data points for inventor affiliations to use in our regression analysis. Our analysis reveals a significant contribution by industrial designers to high-impact inventions. Our estimation result shows that an enrollment of industrial designers increases forward citations of a focal patent application by an average of 17%. We can interpret that these contributions of industrial designers come from their latent demand-oriented thinking, which concurs with recent design studies. This study provides the implication for R&D managers that they should not exclude industrial designers when seeking to develop innovative technologies.

PurposeThis paper narrates a case study on design thinking-based education work in an industrial design honours program. Student projects were developed in a multi-disciplinary setting across a Computing and Engineering faculty that allowed promoting technologically and user-driven innovation strategies.Design/methodology/approachA renewed culture and environment for industrial design (ID) students emphasised seeking functionality and fidelity, user and society value over beauty and form factors alone. The pedagogical approach sought to determine the new industrial products reality with an increasing contribution by design thinking, and its associated methodologies that are currently advancing typical ID.FindingsIn conclusion, the authors propose a number of reflections as recommendations, which may be useful for educational institutions contemplating similar curriculum makeovers to their design degrees.Originality/valueOur research provides valuable lessons to other design courses that wish to invigorate their curriculum with technical and design thinking-based advances.

The paper presents a case to support the business of Small- and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) through the building of partnerships between universities and companies which foster and support the introduction of industrial design processes in the SMEs. The basis of the partnership is the use of the UK government's 'Knowledge Transfer Partnership' (KTP) schemes to initiate and develop in-house industrial design capability in the SMEs. The paper presents two case studies that raise design management issues and underline the value of industrial design expertise for SMEs. It discusses the positive and negative issues centred on the introduction of graduate-level in-house industrial design expertise for product innovation in manufacturing-sector SMEs. The paper demonstrates that through the discipline of industrial design and the mechanism of a well-managed KTP programme, SMEs can improve their commercial performance and operate successfully in global markets.

Three-dimensional (3D) printing is revolutionizing the realm of production by empowering consumers and small businesses to fabricate complex objects from digital designs. However, this technology blurs the boundaries between digital files and physical products, introducing novel challenges for intellectual property (IP) law. This article investigates how Iran and the European Union (EU) are responding to the intellectual property issues emerging from 3D printing, focusing on copyright, patent law, industrial designs, trademark rights, as well as enforcement mechanisms and liability regimes. In the EU, IP protection is governed by detailed directives and regulations—such as the Copyright Directive 2001/29/EC, the Community Design Regulation 6/2002, the Trademark Regulation 207/2009, and the Enforcement Directive 2004/48—and is committed to international treaties including TRIPS and the Berne Convention. In contrast, Iran’s IP framework is based on older legal statutes, notably the Law for the Protection of Authors, Composers, and Artists (1969) and the Law on Registration of Patents, Industrial Designs and Trademarks (2007), and is subject to limited international obligations. Iran is a member of the Paris Convention and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), but not of the Berne Convention, the WIPO Copyright Treaty, or TRIPS. Key differences emerge: for example, EU law generally does not consider the private and non-commercial reproduction of IP-protected objects as an infringement, whereas Iranian law explicitly excludes inventions “contrary to Islamic principles, public order, or morality” from patentability, and likewise restricts trademarks that violate Islamic norms. Drawing on case studies, academic analyses, and official sources (e.g., WIPO, European Commission), we identify the legal gaps in each system and propose reforms. Our comparative analysis underscores the need for legal updates and international cooperation to enable IP law to accommodate the paradigm of digital manufacturing in both jurisdictions.