HICUP Lab on research visit in Japan giving lectures at Nara Institute of Science and Technology

Lecturer: Matjaš Kljun
Title: Technologies for assisting users and enhancing capabilities

Abstract:
New technologies keep penetrating and influencing our lives and it is sometimes difficult to keep track of how it affects us. Human-Computer Interaction as a research field serves both aspects of technology – developing novel technologies to assist humankind and understanding the ways people use technologies in order to improve them. In this talk we are going to present research from both aspects of technology that crosses several disciplines from using augmented reality for education, persuasive technologies to help professional learners on their learning journey, using technology to augment our senses in order to understand the world around us in ways not experienced before, understanding why digital information is vulnerable, and how to help users to understand what they agree to when using technology.

Lecturer: Klen čopič Puvihar
Title: What is Augmented in Augemnted Reality

Abstract:
“If reality is everything that exists then reality cannot be augmented since it is already everything. What we augment is our perception of reality.” [O.Hugues] 
In this talk we will explore different perceptual issues focusing on handheld augmented reality (AR) systems and highlight how these issues affect their usability. We will start by exploring the dual-view perceptual problem caused by standard handheld AR implementation (e.g. rendering the video stream captured by the back-facing camera onto the device’s screen) which shows the real world from the device’s perspective rather than that of the user. We will show how this affects users’ performance and demonstrate different ways in which one can ameliorate this problem. In the second part we will look at depth perception problem whilst focusing on the case study of transcribing contours and volumetric data to real environment.