arXiv subjects

Luciano Gamberini

Publications and source records attributed to Luciano Gamberini.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

"You should see my partners' fingers": A Qualitative Study of Construction Artisans' Perspective on Technical Innovation

Construction industry scholars have advocated increasing digitalization as a harbinger of manifold improvements, from safe training to efficient waste management. Small construction enterprises, which often face greater difficulties in embracing such a paradigm, are frequently overlooked in investigations of stakeholders' views on technical innovation. This study aims to start filling this gap by investigating the views of small construction enterprises on technical innovation. We report the themes that emerged from the qualitative analysis of interviews with construction artisans in North-East Italy in 2018-2019, including installers, restorers, carpenters, painters, and upholsterers (N=25). We asked what makes new technical devices acceptable to them and conducted inductive and deductive thematic analyses to identify recurrent arguments supporting their positions. The analysis identified fifteen premises underlying the interviewees' positions on technical innovation, grouped around four issues: Is technological innovation part of my job? Is the financial cost of innovating worthwhile? Will the new technology be practical? What part of my business is served by communication devices? The study sheds more light on an underrepresented sector and the articulated view of technological innovation in small enterprises, where there is no distance between investors and users. It also adopts a qualitative methodology that can be exported to investigate the acceptability requirements of other samples and specific devices.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2022

Human-centric telerobotics: investigating users' performance and workload via VR-based eye-tracking measures

Virtual Reality (VR) is gaining ground in the robotics and teleoperation industry, opening new prospects as a novel computerized methodology to make humans interact with robots. In contrast with more conventional button-based teleoperations, VR allows users to use their physical movements to drive robotic systems in the virtual environment. The latest VR devices are also equipped with integrated eye-tracking, which constitutes an exceptional opportunity for monitoring users' workload online. However, such devices are fairly recent, and human factors have been consistently marginalized so far in telerobotics research. We thus covered these aspects by analyzing extensive behavioral data generated by 24 participants driving a simulated industrial robot in VR through a pick-and-place task. Users drove the robot via button-based and action-based controls and under low (single-task) and high (dual-task) mental demands. We collected self-reports, performance and eye-tracking data. Specifically, we asked i) how the interactive features of VR affect users' performance and workload, and additionally tested ii) the sensibility of diverse eye parameters in monitoring users' vigilance and workload throughout the task. Users performed faster and more accurately, while also showing a lower mental workload, when using an action-based VR control. Among the eye parameters, pupil size was the most resilient indicator of workload, as it was highly correlated with the self-reports and was not affected by the user's degree of physical motion in VR. Our results thus bring a fresh human-centric overview of human-robot interactions in VR, and systematically demonstrate the potential of VR devices for monitoring human factors in telerobotics contexts.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2022

You Can't Hide Behind Your Headset: User Profiling in Augmented and Virtual Reality

Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR, AR) are increasingly gaining traction thanks to their technical advancement and the need for remote connections, recently accentuated by the pandemic. Remote surgery, telerobotics, and virtual offices are only some examples of their successes. As users interact with VR/AR, they generate extensive behavioral data usually leveraged for measuring human behavior. However, little is known about how this data can be used for other purposes. In this work, we demonstrate the feasibility of user profiling in two different use-cases of virtual technologies: AR everyday application ($N=34$) and VR robot teleoperation ($N=35$). Specifically, we leverage machine learning to identify users and infer their individual attributes (i.e., age, gender). By monitoring users' head, controller, and eye movements, we investigate the ease of profiling on several tasks (e.g., walking, looking, typing) under different mental loads. Our contribution gives significant insights into user profiling in virtual environments.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2020

Internet of Things for Elderly and Fragile People

This paper discusses the potential of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm in the context of assisted living for elderly and fragile people, in the light of the peculiar requirements of such users, both from a functional and a technological perspective. We stress some aspects that are often disregarded by the technical community, such as technology acceptability and usability, and we describe the framework and the phases of the current co-design approaches that imply the active involvement of the final users in the system design process. Thereby, we identify a series of design practices to merge technical and fragile people's requirements. The discussion is backed up by the description of DOMHO, a prototypal IoT-based AAL system that embodies most of the concepts described in the paper, and that is being deployed and tested in a shelter house for elders, and in an apartment for the co-housing of individuals with disabilities. Finally, we discuss the potential and limits of the current approaches and present some open challenges and future research directions.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2019

Embracing ambivalence in studying technology acceptance: A qualitative study on automated visual software for live music performance

Although the live music entertainment sector does not directly fuel the current debate on automation, it might harbor positions that resonate with it. In this paper we study a prototype software application helping DJs and VJs to accurately manage and even automate the synchronization of visuals with music during amateur or professional live performance. The goal of the study was to unravel VJs' and DJs' ambivalent positions about this software. We preliminarily investigated VJs' and DJs' perception of their sector of activity with seven face-to-face interviews and an online survey (N = 102); then, we asked DJs and VJs (N = 25) for their opinions about our prototype software application. Four core controversies were identified in their answers, along with a set of arguments mobilized to take side on them. The advantages of focusing on ambivalence and argumentation when studying users' response to new media are discussed.

cs.HC↗