Special Issue on Advances in Human-Computer Interaction

The unceasing advances of technology as well as the pervasiveness of an increasing number of devices providing a variety of capabilities in intelligent environments are urging innovative and advanced interaction techniques. The aim is offering users ubiquitous, transparent, and natural interaction patterns in different settings, as an essential part of a new way of interpreting the relationship between humans and technology. In particular, a plethora of ubiquitous and pervasive devices and their embedded sensors provide new, and sometimes unforeseen, multimedia and multimodal support to build intelligent smart environments. The papers selected for the first part of this Special Issue outline some recent trends, in particular in the area of multimedia/multimodal applications. Some of these papers are the revised and extended versions of invited selected papers presented at the CHItaly 2017 conference, the biannual conference of the Italian Chapter of ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI). They are representative of the work by researchers and practitioners in the Italian HCI community. Among the issues addressed in this first part, it is possible to mention the challenges associated with hand gesture recognition, and those raised by augmented interaction. Moreover, strategies for effective communications/conversations have also been analyzed from two perspectives: how to help people learn culturally-based communication protocols, and how to teach children managing group conversations through effective turn-taking. Another area that has been covered is related to the needs of people with cognitive disabilities, focusing on how to enhance the accessibility of web pages for people affected by dyslexia, and how to better support cognitive training of people with Alzheimer Disease. The second part of this Special Issue is devoted to an exciting research topic that so far has not received the interest it deserves. Video games design is an intriguing and quite complex field, since it melts together results and findings deriving from many, widely different, disciplines, e.g., computer science, physics, music, visual art, industrial design, project management, marketing, mathematics, literature, anthropology, social sciences, medicine, storytelling, psychology and economy. A “melting pot” that emerges as especially suited to deal with new, emerging technologies, and which challenges both the academy and the industry: virtual and augmented reality, tangible interfaces, sensors, biometry, etc. Actually, these innovations can be exploited to figure out new game mechanics, and can influence all those aspects related to the interaction paradigms with the users and the related user experience. The latter holds both for games produced for pure entertainment, and for those which, instead, aim at addressing education, teaching or even more delicate fields such as rehabilitation. In many cases, the lack of a solid theoretical ground hinders the production of key guidelines and good practices directly deployable in the companies. Hence, the authors of the papers presented in the second part of this Special Issue have been invited to contribute in the advancement of the video game design field, by submitting works focusing on the complete spectrum of the computer science areas affecting the interaction patterns in the dyad human being – video game. In particular, a subset of the papers presented in the “game section” of this Special Issue are the revised and extended versions of selected papers presented at the 1st Workshop on Games-Human Interaction (GHItaly 17), held in conjunction with CHItaly 2017. The aim of the workshop has been both to bring together scholars belonging to very different disciplinary areas and establish a common ground on the topic of video game design, and to propose a meeting venue for researchers in a field still too underestimated, especially in Italy.