Establishing public display infrastructure to promote user engagement using avatars

Abstract

In recent years the deployment of interactive displays in public environments has rapidly increased and thus, public displays are now widely spread, offering a variety of applications. However various studies investigating the user engagement with public displays have found that these are mostly ignored by pedestrians. This corresponds to the phenomenon of ''display & interaction blindness'', identified in previous work. Our hypothesis is that by allowing the user to create and customize an avatar in order to interact with the display, the user establishes a more personal bond with the display application. Hence, in this bachelor thesis we investigated the impact of customisable, virtual avatars to promote user engagement. In a user study involving 20 participants, we explored visual preferences for designing such virtual avatars. With respect to future work, we implemented an infrastructure that, besides allowing the creation and customisation of avatars, visualises the avatars of nearby users and allows interaction with the display through an android application.