IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - March 2018 - 63

This special issue on advanced interaction and virtual/augmented reality called for different contributions pertaining to
ongoing technical developments; practical applications and
use cases, user studies and evaluations; standardization
efforts; and next-generation technologies. After an intense
review process, 13 out of 25 submitted articles were ultimately accepted. These articles succeed in providing a comprehensive view of current and future trends that characterize the
heterogeneous contexts of interest for the CE field and will
hopefully represent a reference for activities that will be developed in the coming years.
This topic has been split into multiple issues. This issue
includes five articles that mostly focus on the first major topic
addressed, i.e., advanced human-machine interactions. A second set of articles, which will be published in an upcoming
issue of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine, will specifically deal with virtual and augmented reality. However, as you
will easily realize after reviewing the article titles, a neat distinction between the two fields is essentially impossible.
In the first article, "Interaction with Three-Dimensional
Gesture and Character Input in Virtual Reality," Yang et al.
explore the domain of hand-gesture-based interaction, with a
focus on character input. In particular, they present a natural
three-dimensional input method based on stereo cameras that
can be used in virtual reality environments. In the article,
experiments aimed to study character recognition performance using symbols from the Chinese alphabet drawn in
various directions are reported.
In "Detecting Hand Gestures with Wi-Fi Technology,"
Lao and Wong study another form of hand-based interaction.
In this case, the technology considered is Wi-Fi, and the article focuses on studying how changes pertaining to receivedsignal-strength indicator values in Wi-Fi packets can be used
to recognize hand gestures. A prototype application is
reported, which allows users to control a video player program. By clapping their hands or placing them in front of the
receiver or moving them toward it, users can start, pause,
and stop the playback.
In their article, "Interactive Sculpting for Engineering Purposes Using Augmented-Reality, Mesh Morphing, and Force-Feedback," Valentini and Biancolini also explore the possibilities of
hand-based interaction, applied, in this case, to the interactive
morphing of geometrical surfaces that are typical of computeraided design applications. The authors combine video-based augmented reality with the use of a force-feedback device to obtain a
very high level of realism and enhance the interaction during
geometry editing tasks.
Gestures are also tackled in the article titled "Harnessing
Audio in Auto Control" by Bressolette et al. However, more
focus is placed on the output of the interaction rather than on
the input. The authors propose using sound for carrying the
feedback of manipulation. In this particular case, virtual
objects are considered, and different sound parameters are
studied to identify the ones providing the higher level of
naturalness during interaction.

The hope is that reported
experiences will inspire more
researchers who are actively
working in these fields and
contribute to new advancements.
In the final article, "Implementation and Evaluation of a
Collaborative Conversational Recommender in a 3-D Virtual
World," Contreras et al. focus on recommender systems used,
e.g., by home electronics devices to deliver online personalized services. Here, user-recommender system interaction is
studied, and a collaborative recommendation method that is
shown to improve user experience and increase the performance of the recommendation process is proposed.
The richness and diversity of the articles submitted to this
special issue confirm the primary role that advanced interaction (and virtual/augmented reality) is expected to play in the
context of CE in the coming years. The hope is that reported
experiences will inspire more researchers who are actively
working in these fields and contribute to new advancements.
We thank both the authors and the reviewers for their great
contributions. We also wish to thank IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine Editor-in-Chief Saraju P. Mohanty for providing us with the opportunity to serve as guest editors for this
special issue and for the assistance he offered throughout the
publication process.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Fabrizio Lamberti (fabrizio.lamberti@polito.it) is an associate professor with the Department of Control and Computer
Engineering at the Politecnico di Torino, Italy. He has
authored more than 150 papers, which have been published in
international books, journals, and conference proceedings. He
serves as the secretary/treasurer of the IEEE Computer Society Italy Chapter. He is currently an associate editor of IEEE
Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing and IEEE
Consumer Electronics Magazine. He is a Senior Member of
the IEEE.
Fernando Pescador (pescador@sec.upm.es) has been an
associate professor at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid,
Spain, since 1995 and the head of the Telematic and Electronic Engineering Department since 2012. He has published
several papers in journals and conferences related to consumer electronics, and his research interests are real-time
video coding, multiprocessor architectures for video coding,
and digital video broadcasting. He has been the editor-inchief of IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics since
2017 and is a member of the Board of Governors of the
IEEE Consumer Electronic Society. He is a Senior Member
of the IEEE.

march 2018

IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - March 2018