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PhD Defense: Design Considerations for Remote Expert Guidance Using Extended Reality in Skilled Hobby Settings
Hanuma Teja Maddali
4105 Zoom: https://umd.zoom.us/j/5134771051?pwd=MmRWT0VUZXd3azZOdFBNSHQ1SU0xZz09 Brendan Iribe Center for Computer Science and Engineering (IRB)
Thursday, April 20, 2023, 10:00 am-12:00 pm Calendar
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Abstract
As compact, lightweight extended-reality (XR) devices become increasingly available, research is being reinvigorated in a number of areas. One such application involves remote collaboration, where a remote expert can assist, train, or share skills or ideas with a local user to solve a real-world task. For example, researchers have looked into real-time expert assistance and professional training of novices in skilled physical activities such as field servicing and surgical training. Even as our understanding of XR for remote collaboration in professional settings advances, an area that has not been examined is how XR can support such expert-novice collaboration in skilled hobby activities. In skilled hobby activities such as gardening, woodworking, and knitting. Metrics such as task accuracy or efficiency are often less important than in professional settings. Instead, other dimensions, such as social connectedness (i.e. the emotional experience) may become central dimensions that should inform system design.

In my dissertation, I examine how the XR environment can be designed to support the sharing of skills in hobby activities. I have selected gardening as a hobby activity to examine remote skill-sharing in XR between experts and novices. Like in other hobby activities, learning gardening practices remotely can involve asynchronous, text or image/video based communication on Facebook groups. While these may be helpful for individual questions, these do not capture the social, affective, and embodied dimensions of gaining expertise as a novice through situated learning in the garden. In my work, I seek to understand how to design a social XR environment that captures these dimensions in ways that are acceptable and useful to intergenerational expert-novice gardener groups.

Through my dissertation work I answer the following research questions:
  1. How do practitioners of a particular hobby exhibit sociality and what kinds of social interactions facilitate skill sharing? What are some key opportunities for computer supported collaborative work in this space?
  2. What are practitioners’ perceptions of using XR for skill-sharing? What are important dimensions of the design space and design scenarios for social XR systems?
  3. How do practitioners use different components of the activity space (e.g. tools, sensory stimuli) and their affordances to facilitate social connection? What is the important context to capture when reconstructing these objects virtually for remote interaction in XR? (e.g. interactivity, realism)
  4. What are some design considerations for XR to support accessible interactions that reflect the values and goals of an intergenerational group?

 

 
Examining Committee

Chair:

Dr. Amanda Lazar

Dean's Representative:

Dr. Paul T. Leisnham

Members:

Dr. Matthias Zwicker
 

Dr. Huaishu Peng
 

Dr. Wayne G. Lutters
Bio

Teja Maddali is a Ph.D candidate at the University of Maryland (UMD) in the Department of Computer Science. He is being advised by Dr. Amanda Lazar of The Health, Aging, and Technology (THAT) Lab at UMD. His research work lies at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, and Extended Reality (XR) and has won best-paper awards at ACM SIGCHI. He is also a research engineer at Headwall VR with whom he won the National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) 2022 CommanDING Tech UI/UX Challenge to design next-generation incident command dashboards for first-responders. Prior to UMD, Teja obtained his Masters in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Georgia Tech (Atlanta, USA) and Bachelors in Electronics and Communication from BNM Institute of Technology (Bangalore, India).

This talk is organized by Tom Hurst