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Pablo Cesar

Publications and source records attributed to Pablo Cesar.

18 recordsLinked to original sources

Towards Gaze-Informed AI Disclosure Interfaces: Eye-Tracking Attentional and Cognitive Load While Reading AI-Assisted News

As generative AI becomes increasingly integrated into journalism, designing effective AI-use disclosures that inform readers without imposing unnecessary burden is a key challenge. While prior research has primarily focused on trust and credibility, the impact of disclosures on readers' attentional and cognitive load remains underexplored. To address this gap, we conducted a $3\times2\times2$ mixed factorial study manipulating the level of AI-use disclosure detail (none, one-line, detailed), news type (politics, lifestyle), and role of AI (editing, partial content generation), measuring load via NASA-TLX and eye-tracking. Our results reveal a significant attentional cost: one-line disclosures resulted in significantly higher fixation durations and saccade counts, particularly for AI-edited content. Detailed disclosures did not impose additional burden. Drawing on Information-Gap Theory, we argue that brief labels may trigger increased visual scrutiny by alerting readers to AI use without providing enough information. NASA-TLX scores and pupil diameter showed no significant differences across conditions, suggesting that AI-use disclosures do not impose cognitive burden regardless of the detail level. Interview insights contextualize these findings and reveal a strong preference for detailed or ``detail-on-demand'' designs. Our findings inform the design of gaze-informed adaptive disclosure interfaces that dynamically adjust transparency levels based on readers' attentional patterns and news context.

cs.HC

More Human or More AI? Visualizing Human-AI Collaboration Disclosures in Journalistic News Production

Within journalistic editorial processes, disclosing AI usage is currently limited to simplistic labels, which misses the nuance of how humans and AI collaborated on a news article. Through co-design sessions (N=10), we elicited 69 disclosure designs and implemented four prototypes that visually disclose human-AI collaboration in journalism. We then ran a within-subjects lab study (N=32) to examine how disclosure visualizations (Textual, Role-based Timeline, Task-based Timeline, Chatbot) and collaboration ratios (Primarily Human vs. Primarily AI) influenced visualization perceptions, gaze patterns, and post-experience responses. We found that textual disclosures were least effective in communicating human-AI collaboration, whereas Chatbot offered the most in-depth information. Furthermore, while role-based timelines amplified AI contribution in primarily human articles, task-based timeline shifted perceptions toward human involvement in primarily AI articles. We contribute Human-AI collaboration disclosure visualizations and their evaluation, and cautionary considerations on how visualizations can alter perceptions of AI's actual role during news article creation.

cs.HC

Full Disclosure, Less Trust? How the Level of Detail about AI Use in News Writing Affects Readers' Trust

As artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly integrated into news production, calls for transparency about the use of AI have gained considerable traction. Recent studies suggest that AI disclosures can lead to a ``transparency dilemma'', where disclosure reduces readers' trust. However, little is known about how the \textit{level of detail} in AI disclosures influences trust and contributes to this dilemma within the news context. In this 3$\times$2$\times$2 mixed factorial study with 40 participants, we investigate how three levels of AI disclosures (none, one-line, detailed) across two types of news (politics and lifestyle) and two levels of AI involvement (low and high) affect news readers' trust. We measured trust using the News Media Trust questionnaire, along with two decision behaviors: source-checking and subscription decisions. Questionnaire responses and subscription rates showed a decline in trust only for detailed AI disclosures, whereas source-checking behavior increased for both one-line and detailed disclosures, with the effect being more pronounced for detailed disclosures. Insights from semi-structured interviews suggest that source-checking behavior was primarily driven by interest in the topic, followed by trust, whereas trust was the main factor influencing subscription decisions. Around two-thirds of participants expressed a preference for detailed disclosures, while most participants who preferred one-line indicated a need for detail-on-demand disclosure formats. Our findings show that not all AI disclosures lead to a transparency dilemma, but instead reflect a trade-off between readers' desire for more transparency and their trust in AI-assisted news content.

cs.HC

Understanding Trust Toward Human versus AI-generated Health Information through Behavioral and Physiological Sensing

As AI-generated health information proliferates online and becomes increasingly indistinguishable from human-sourced information, it becomes critical to understand how people trust and label such content, especially when the information is inaccurate. We conducted two complementary studies: (1) a mixed-methods survey (N=142) employing a 2 (source: Human vs. LLM) $\times$ 2 (label: Human vs. AI) $\times$ 3 (type: General, Symptom, Treatment) design, and (2) a within-subjects lab study (N=40) incorporating eye-tracking and physiological sensing (ECG, EDA, skin temperature). Participants were presented with health information varying by source-label combinations and asked to rate their trust, while their gaze behavior and physiological signals were recorded. We found that LLM-generated information was trusted more than human-generated content, whereas information labeled as human was trusted more than that labeled as AI. Trust remained consistent across information types. Eye-tracking and physiological responses varied significantly by source and label. Machine learning models trained on these behavioral and physiological features predicted binary self-reported trust levels with 73% accuracy and information source with 65% accuracy. Our findings demonstrate that adding transparency labels to online health information modulates trust. Behavioral and physiological features show potential to verify trust perceptions and indicate if additional transparency is needed.

cs.HC

LEGO Co-builder: Exploring Fine-Grained Vision-Language Modeling for Multimodal LEGO Assembly Assistants

Vision-language models (VLMs) are facing the challenges of understanding and following multimodal assembly instructions, particularly when fine-grained spatial reasoning and precise object state detection are required. In this work, we explore LEGO Co-builder, a hybrid benchmark combining real-world LEGO assembly logic with programmatically generated multimodal scenes. The dataset captures stepwise visual states and procedural instructions, allowing controlled evaluation of instruction-following, object detection, and state detection. We introduce a unified framework and assess leading VLMs such as GPT-4o, Gemini, and Qwen-VL, under zero-shot and fine-tuned settings. We also evaluated the framework using a reasoning-focused model, GLM-4.1-thinking. Our results show that while object detection achieved high performance (98.16% with fine-tuned InstructBLIP), fine-grained scene understanding and assembly state detection remain challenging: Fine-tuned MiniGPT-v2 reached only 37.52% F1 for identifying theme entities, and even advanced models such as GPT-4o achieved just 40.54% F1 on state detection. This highlights gaps in fine-grained visual understanding among existing models. We release the benchmark, codebase, and generation pipeline to support future research on multimodal assembly assistants grounded in real-world workflows.

cs.AI

Autonomous Workflow for Multimodal Fine-Grained Training Assistants Towards Mixed Reality

Autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) agents have emerged as promising protocols for automatically understanding the language-based environment, particularly with the exponential development of large language models (LLMs). However, a fine-grained, comprehensive understanding of multimodal environments remains under-explored. This work designs an autonomous workflow tailored for integrating AI agents seamlessly into extended reality (XR) applications for fine-grained training. We present a demonstration of a multimodal fine-grained training assistant for LEGO brick assembly in a pilot XR environment. Specifically, we design a cerebral language agent that integrates LLM with memory, planning, and interaction with XR tools and a vision-language agent, enabling agents to decide their actions based on past experiences. Furthermore, we introduce LEGO-MRTA, a multimodal fine-grained assembly dialogue dataset synthesized automatically in the workflow served by a commercial LLM. This dataset comprises multimodal instruction manuals, conversations, XR responses, and vision question answering. Last, we present several prevailing open-resource LLMs as benchmarks, assessing their performance with and without fine-tuning on the proposed dataset. We anticipate that the broader impact of this workflow will advance the development of smarter assistants for seamless user interaction in XR environments, fostering research in both AI and HCI communities.

cs.CL

Transparent AI Disclosure Obligations: Who, What, When, Where, Why, How

Advances in Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) are resulting in AI-generated media output that is (nearly) indistinguishable from human-created content. This can drastically impact users and the media sector, especially given global risks of misinformation. While the currently discussed European AI Act aims at addressing these risks through Article 52's AI transparency obligations, its interpretation and implications remain unclear. In this early work, we adopt a participatory AI approach to derive key questions based on Article 52's disclosure obligations. We ran two workshops with researchers, designers, and engineers across disciplines (N=16), where participants deconstructed Article 52's relevant clauses using the 5W1H framework. We contribute a set of 149 questions clustered into five themes and 18 sub-themes. We believe these can not only help inform future legal developments and interpretations of Article 52, but also provide a starting point for Human-Computer Interaction research to (re-)examine disclosure transparency from a human-centered AI lens.

cs.HC

PointPCA+: Extending PointPCA objective quality assessment metric

A computationally-simplified and descriptor-richer Point Cloud Quality Assessment (PCQA) metric, namely PointPCA+, is proposed in this paper, which is an extension of PointPCA. PointPCA proposed a set of perceptually-relevant descriptors based on PCA decomposition that were applied to both the geometry and texture data of point clouds for full reference PCQA. PointPCA+ employs PCA only on the geometry data while enriching existing geometry and texture descriptors, that are computed more efficiently. Similarly to PointPCA, a total quality score is obtained through a learning-based fusion of individual predictions from geometry and texture descriptors that capture local shape and appearance properties, respectively. Before feature fusion, a feature selection module is introduced to choose the most effective features from a proposed super-set. Experimental results show that PointPCA+ achieves high predictive performance against subjective ground truth scores obtained from publicly available datasets. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/cwi-dis/pointpca_suite/}.

cs.CV

Volumetric video streaming: Current approaches and implementations

The rise of capturing systems for objects and scenes in 3D with increased fidelity and immersion has led to the popularity of volumetric video contents that can be seen from any position and angle in 6 degrees of freedom navigation. Such contents need large volumes of data to accurately represent the real world. Thus, novel optimization solutions and delivery systems are needed to enable volumetric video streaming over bandwidth-limited networks. In this chapter, we discuss theoretical approaches to volumetric video streaming optimization, through compression solutions, as well as network and user adaptation, for high-end and low-powered devices. Moreover, we present an overview of existing end-to-end systems, and we point to the future of volumetric video streaming.

cs.MM

Evaluating the Impact of Tiled User-Adaptive Real-Time Point Cloud Streaming on VR Remote Communication

Remote communication has rapidly become a part of everyday life in both professional and personal contexts. However, popular video conferencing applications present limitations in terms of quality of communication, immersion and social meaning. VR remote communication applications offer a greater sense of co-presence and mutual sensing of emotions between remote users. Previous research on these applications has shown that realistic point cloud user reconstructions offer better immersion and communication as compared to synthetic user avatars. However, photorealistic point clouds require a large volume of data per frame and are challenging to transmit over bandwidth-limited networks. Recent research has demonstrated significant improvements to perceived quality by optimizing the usage of bandwidth based on the position and orientation of the user's viewport with user-adaptive streaming. In this work, we developed a real-time VR communication application with an adaptation engine that features tiled user-adaptive streaming based on user behaviour. The application also supports traditional network adaptive streaming. The contribution of this work is to evaluate the impact of tiled user-adaptive streaming on quality of communication, visual quality, system performance and task completion in a functional live VR remote communication system. We perform a subjective evaluation with 33 users to compare the different streaming conditions with a neck exercise training task. As a baseline, we use uncompressed streaming requiring ca. 300Mbps and our solution achieves similar visual quality with tiled adaptive streaming at 14Mbps. We also demonstrate statistically significant gains to the quality of interaction and improvements to system performance and CPU consumption with tiled adaptive streaming as compared to the more traditional network adaptive streaming.

cs.MM

On the impact of VR assessment on the Quality of Experience of Highly Realistic Digital Humans

Fuelled by the increase in popularity of virtual and augmented reality applications, point clouds have emerged as a popular 3D format for acquisition and rendering of digital humans, thanks to their versatility and real-time capabilities. Due to technological constraints and real-time rendering limitations, however, the visual quality of dynamic point cloud contents is seldom evaluated using virtual and augmented reality devices, instead relying on prerecorded videos displayed on conventional 2D screens. In this study, we evaluate how the visual quality of point clouds representing digital humans is affected by compression distortions. In particular, we compare three different viewing conditions based on the degrees of freedom that are granted to the viewer: passive viewing (2DTV), head rotation (3DoF), and rotation and translation (6DoF), to understand how interacting in the virtual space affects the perception of quality. We provide both quantitative and qualitative results of our evaluation involving 78 participants, and we make the data publicly available. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study evaluating the quality of dynamic point clouds in virtual reality, and comparing it to traditional viewing settings. Results highlight the dependency of visual quality on the content under test, and limitations in the way current data sets are used to evaluate compression solutions. Moreover, influencing factors in quality evaluation in VR, and shortcomings in how point cloud encoding solutions handle visually-lossless compression, are discussed.

cs.MM

Extending 3-DoF Metrics to Model User Behaviour Similarity in 6-DoF Immersive Applications

Immersive reality technologies, such as Virtual and Augmented Reality, have ushered a new era of user-centric systems, in which every aspect of the coding--delivery--rendering chain is tailored to the interaction of the users. Understanding the actual interactivity and behaviour of the users is still an open challenge and a key step to enabling such a user-centric system. Our main goal is to extend the applicability of existing behavioural methodologies for studying user navigation in the case of 6 Degree-of-Freedom (DoF). Specifically, we first compare the navigation in 6-DoF with its 3-DoF counterpart highlighting the main differences and novelties. Then, we define new metrics aimed at better modelling behavioural similarities between users in a 6-DoF system. We validate and test our solutions on real navigation paths of users interacting with dynamic volumetric media in 6-DoF Virtual Reality conditions. Our results show that metrics that consider both user position and viewing direction better perform in detecting user similarity while navigating in a 6-DoF system. Having easy-to-use but robust metrics that underpin multiple tools and answer the question ``how do we detect if two users look at the same content?" open the gate to new solutions for a user-centric system.

cs.HC

PointPCA: Point Cloud Objective Quality Assessment Using PCA-Based Descriptors

Point clouds denote a prominent solution for the representation of 3D photo-realistic content in immersive applications. Similarly to other imaging modalities, quality predictions for point cloud contents are vital for a wide range of applications, enabling trade-off optimizations between data quality and data size in every processing step from acquisition to rendering. In this work, we focus on use cases that consider human end-users consuming point cloud contents and, hence, we concentrate on visual quality metrics. In particular, we propose a set of perceptually relevant descriptors based on Principal Component Analysis (PCA) decomposition, which is applied to both geometry and texture data for full-reference point cloud quality assessment. Statistical features are derived from these descriptors to characterize local shape and appearance properties for both a reference and a distorted point cloud. The extracted statistical features are subsequently compared to provide corresponding predictions of visual quality for the distorted point cloud. As part of our method, a learning-based approach is proposed to fuse these individual predictors to a unified perceptual score. We validate the accuracy of the individual predictors, as well as the unified quality scores obtained after regression against subjectively annotated datasets, showing that our metric outperforms state-of-the-art solutions. Insights regarding design decisions are provided through exploratory studies, evaluating the performance of our metric under different parameter configurations, attribute domains, color spaces, and regression models. A software implementation of the proposed metric is made available at the following link: https://github.com/cwi-dis/pointpca.

cs.MM

HUMAN4D: A Human-Centric Multimodal Dataset for Motions and Immersive Media

We introduce HUMAN4D, a large and multimodal 4D dataset that contains a variety of human activities simultaneously captured by a professional marker-based MoCap, a volumetric capture and an audio recording system. By capturing 2 female and $2$ male professional actors performing various full-body movements and expressions, HUMAN4D provides a diverse set of motions and poses encountered as part of single- and multi-person daily, physical and social activities (jumping, dancing, etc.), along with multi-RGBD (mRGBD), volumetric and audio data. Despite the existence of multi-view color datasets captured with the use of hardware (HW) synchronization, to the best of our knowledge, HUMAN4D is the first and only public resource that provides volumetric depth maps with high synchronization precision due to the use of intra- and inter-sensor HW-SYNC. Moreover, a spatio-temporally aligned scanned and rigged 3D character complements HUMAN4D to enable joint research on time-varying and high-quality dynamic meshes. We provide evaluation baselines by benchmarking HUMAN4D with state-of-the-art human pose estimation and 3D compression methods. For the former, we apply 2D and 3D pose estimation algorithms both on single- and multi-view data cues. For the latter, we benchmark open-source 3D codecs on volumetric data respecting online volumetric video encoding and steady bit-rates. Furthermore, qualitative and quantitative visual comparison between mesh-based volumetric data reconstructed in different qualities showcases the available options with respect to 4D representations. HUMAN4D is introduced to the computer vision and graphics research communities to enable joint research on spatio-temporally aligned pose, volumetric, mRGBD and audio data cues. The dataset and its code are available https://tofis.github.io/myurls/human4d.

cs.CV

Towards SocialVR: Evaluating a Novel Technology for Watching Videos Together

Social VR enables people to interact over distance with others in real-time. It allows remote people, typically represented as avatars, to communicate and perform activities together in a join shared virtual environment, extending the capabilities of traditional social platforms like Facebook and Netflix. This paper explores the benefits and drawbacks provided by a lightweight and low-cost Social VR platform (SocialVR), in which users are captured by several cameras and reconstructed in real-time. In particular, the paper contributes with (1) the design and evaluation of an experimental protocol for Social VR experiences; (2) the report of a production workflow for this new type of media experiences; and (3) the results of experiments with both end-users (N=15 pairs) and professionals (N=25) to evaluate the potential of the SocialVR platform. Results from the questionnaires and semi-structured interviews show that end-users rated positively towards the experiences provided by the SocialVR platform, which enabled them to sense emotions and communicate effortlessly. End-users perceived the photo-realistic experience of SocialVR similar to face-to-face scenarios and appreciated this new creative medium. From a commercial perspective, professionals confirmed the potential of this communication medium and encourage further research for the adoption of the platform in the commercial landscape

cs.MM

Proxemics and Social Interactions in an Instrumented Virtual Reality Workshop

Virtual environments (VEs) can create collaborative and social spaces, which are increasingly important in the face of remote work and travel reduction. Recent advances, such as more open and widely available platforms, create new possibilities to observe and analyse interaction in VEs. Using a custom instrumented build of Mozilla Hubs to measure position and orientation, we conducted an academic workshop to facilitate a range of typical workshop activities. We analysed social interactions during a keynote, small group breakouts, and informal networking/hallway conversations. Our mixed-methods approach combined environment logging, observations, and semi-structured interviews. The results demonstrate how small and large spaces influenced group formation, shared attention, and personal space, where smaller rooms facilitated more cohesive groups while larger rooms made small group formation challenging but personal space more flexible. Beyond our findings, we show how the combination of data and insights can fuel collaborative spaces' design and deliver more effective virtual workshops.

cs.HC

Surveying the Social, Smart and Converged TV Landscape: Where is Television Research Headed?

The TV is dead motto of just a few years ago has been replaced by the prospect of Internet Protocol (IP) television experiences over converged networks to become one of the great technology opportunities in the next few years. As an introduction to the Special Issue on Smart, Social and Converged Television, this extended editorial intends to review the current IP television landscape in its many realizations: operator-based, over-the-top, and user generated. We will address new services like social TV and recommendation engines, dissemination including new paradigms built on peer to peer and content centric networks, as well as the all important quality of experience that challenges services and networks alike. But we intend to go further than just review the existing work by proposing areas for the future of television research. These include strategies to provide services that are more efficient in network and energy usage while being socially engaging, novel services that will provide consumers with a broader choice of content and devices, and metrics that will enable operators and users alike to define the level of service they require or that they are ready to provide. These topics are addressed in this survey paper that attempts to create a unifying framework to link them all together. Not only is television not dead, it is well alive, thriving and fostering innovation and this paper will hopefully prove it.

cs.MM