The Fall 2019 instantiation of HCI Outdoors delved into early draft chapters of our upcoming HCI Outdoors book. The results of our discussions will be seen in the book, coming in late 2020 from Springer. Students also undertook projects inspired by the ideas from the book chapters. The project are described next, with pictures for select projects following.

• Trail Stories. Ph.D. candidate Lindah Kotut, together with Master’s student Liyan Li and undergrad Melissa Mayo, explored how social media platforms Reddit, Twitter, and Instagram are used to tell stories about thru-hikes on the Appalachian Trail and other long trails. The project looks at how these platforms are used in the preparation, experience, and reflection parts of a hike, and how additional digital tools can be crafted to help hikers tell their stories from their data.
• Shared Outdoor Experiences. Ph.D. candidate Derek Haqq joined by Setor Zilevu and Allison Collier, explored how people can share their outdoor experiences with friends and relatives who are unable to join them. They designed and created three mobile outdoor-centric games: Shared Xperiences supported a user’s sense of a remote outdoor location to foster feelings of a outdoor space; Pairshare developed feelings of connection and shared experience among users; PlanetRunner balanced these features to foster feelings of a shared recreational experience as well as to promote user’s sense of a remote outdoor location. A deployment with 67 users showed initial successes and areas for future work.
• Navigating with Augmented Reality. Ph.D. candidate Leo Soares, together with Masters student Samat Imamov and undergrads Jean-Marc Cassier and Wesley Nguyen, crafted and analyzed an augmented reality prototype to help groups of hikers stay connected on long hikes–despite the different hiking speeds that often causes conflicts on hikes.
• FitAware. Shuai Liu, Zhennan Yao, and Jixiang Fan, grad students in Computer Science, are working on a health and fitness app that helps small groups 3-6 people who know each other well to help each other through competition and cooperation. Shuai is continuing the work toward his thesis, to be completed in May 2020.
• Disorientation and Outdoor Tasks. Ph.D. students Neelma Bhatti and Morva Saati explored how young children become distracted during outdoor-style tasks like plant identification–particularly in busy environments. While tech is a big draw, and competing tech interests (and nature-related occurrences) can draw attention, the biggest distractors came from family and friends.
• Disease on the Trail. Grad students Tim Stelter and Deepika Subrinaminan examined factors that can be instrumental in creating a system that tracks diseases outdoors. Extended trails like the Appalachian Trail, with large bubbles of hikers that traverse trails over many weeks or months, can create avenues for viruses, tick-borne diseases, and other diseases. Tim and Deepika examined a long list of disease-related apps along the axes of notification, rapid response, and knowledge creation.
• Biometrics Outdoors. Grad students Grace Wusk, Harsh Sanghavi and Arjuna Sondhi explored how biometrics can be used to understand trail experiences. Specifically, they merged GPS data from a mobile phone with data from the Empatica E4 wristband that records photoplethysmography (PPG), electrodermal activity (EDA), skin temperature, 3-axis acceleration, and 3-axis orientation. It was challenging to collect meaningful biometric data outside of a highly-controlled lab setting, though quiet, distraction-free trails showed promise.