It is well known from prior work, that people interacting as well as attending to a public display attract further people to interact. This behavior is commonly referred to as the honeypot effect. At the same time, there are often situations where an audience is present in the vicinity of a public display that does not actively engage or pay attention to the display or an approaching user. However, it is largely unknown how such a passive audience impacts on users or people who intend to interact. In this paper, we investigate the influence of a passive audience on the engagement of people with a public display. In more detail, we report on the deployment of a display in a public space. We collected and analyzed video logs to understand how people react to passive audience in the vicinity of public displays. We found an influence on where interacting users position themselves relative to both display and passive audience as well as on their behavior. Our findings are valuable for display providers and space owners who want to maximize the display's benefits.

Public displays have lately become ubiquitous thanks to the decreasing cost of such technology and public policies supporting the development of smart cities. Depending on form factor, those displays might use touchless gestural interfaces that therefore are becoming more often the subject of public and private research. In this paper, we focus on touchless interactions with situated public displays, and introduce a pilot study on comparing two interfaces: An interface based on the Microsoft Human Interface Guidelines (HIG), a de facto standard in the field, and a novel interface, designed by us. Differently from the HIG-based one, our interface displays an avatar, which does not require any activation gestures to trigger actions. Our aim is to study how the two interfaces address the so-called interaction blindness - the inability of the users to recognize the interactive capabilities of those displays. According to our pilot study, although providing a different approach, both interfaces has proven effective in the proposed scenario: A public display in a hall inside a University campus building

The increasing complexity of patented mechanical designs means that their novelty and inventive steps increasingly rely on interacting geometric features and how they contribute to device functions. These features and interactions are normally incorporated in patents through clear patent claims. However, patents can be difficult to interpret and understand for designers due to their legal terminologies. This suggests there is a need for greater awareness of relevant prior art amongst designers in terms of avoiding potential conflict. This paper presents a framework that helps designers obtain insight on relevant prior art and enables emerging design–prior art comparison. The framework mainly contains development of a patent graphical functional representation, a domain-specific ontology and a semantic database. The graphical representation presenting the functional reasoning of patents in terms of interacting geometric features. A domain-specific ontology enables knowledge sharing and conceptualisation, providing a standardised vocabulary for describing patented designs. By formulating patent data into a semantic database, commonality of working principles between an emerging design and prior art can be identified. This enables early identification of potential conflict and thereby could help designers steer their emerging designs away from protected solutions. A computer tool being developed based on this approach is also described.