Special Issue on Advances in Human-Computer Interaction

Carmelo Ardito, Maria De Marsico, Davide Gadia, Dario Maggiorini, Ilaria Mariani, Laura Ripamonti, Carmen Santoro
2019 Multimedia tools and applications  
Extended author information available on the last page of the article 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
more » ... ty 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 beingvideo 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. The six papers in the first section of the Special Issue are shortly presented in the following. Hand gesture is still one of the most efficient and natural ways for human communication and, as a result, hand gesture recognition is becoming increasingly important. The article "Hand Gesture Recognition using Topological Features" [11] presents a topological approach to address the hand gesture recognition problem, by defining a hand gesture descriptor based on a Growing Neural Gas graph. The proposed algorithm uses the boundary of such a graph as a coarse approximation of the boundary of the object, and combines the information captured from the boundary with information of the region of the hand. The approach is able to extract the features that best capture the main geometrical/topological properties of the graph. The proposed subject-independent algorithm is evaluated on NTU Hand Digits dataset and compared against state-of-the-art methods: the achieved results are comparable with methods that use depth and color. The authors also prepared a comprehensive dataset (SBU-1) for different hand gestures containing 2170 images and including many possible deformations and variations, as well as some articulations which currently are not captured by existing datasets. The proposed algorithm is robust to scale, rotation and noise, while preserving similar recognition rate in comparison with the state-of-the-art results. Publisher's Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Affiliations
doi:10.1007/s11042-019-7690-5 fatcat:fajjhizzbvcapgfi7mjkjb6it4