Publications

April 24, 2020

ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI)

We present a compact broadband linear actuator, Chasm, that renders expressive haptic feedback on wearable and handheld devices. Unlike typical motor-based haptic devices with integrated gearheads, Chasm utilizes a miniature leadscrew coupled to a motor shaft, thereby directly translating the high-speed rotation of the motor to the linear motion of a nut carriage without an additional transmission.

Areas: AR/VR Human Computer Interaction & UX

April 20, 2020

IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics (WASPAA)

A recent approach to improving the robustness of sound localization in reverberant environments is based on pre-selection of time-frequency pixels that are dominated by direct sound. This approach is equivalent to applying a binary time-frequency mask prior to the localization stage. Although the binary mask approach was shown to be effective, it may not exploit the information available in the captured signal to its full extent. In an attempt to overcome this limitation, it is hereby proposed to employ a soft mask instead of the binary mask.

Areas: AR/VR Machine Learning

April 9, 2020

International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)

The paper proposes an efficient, robust, and reconfigurable technique to suppress various types of noises for any sampling rate. The theoretical analyses, subjective and objective test results show that the proposed noise suppression (NS) solution significantly enhances the speech transmission index (STI), speech intelligibility (SI), signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and subjective listening experience.

Areas: AR/VR Facebook AI Research Human Computer Interaction & UX Machine Learning Natural Language Processing & Speech

March 28, 2020

IEEE Haptics Symposium

We explore how a custom-built, low degree-of-freedom, wearable haptic display may mediate the encoding and decoding of a set of complex socio-emotional messages that is sent and received by strangers, intimate partners, and even the same individual a week later.

Areas: AR/VR Human Computer Interaction & UX

March 21, 2020

IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces

When building virtual reality applications teams must choose between different configurations of the hardware and/or software aspects, and other factors, of the experience. In this paper we extend a framework for assessing how these factors contribute to quality of experience in an example evaluation. We consider how four factors related to avatar expressiveness affect quality of experience: Eye Gaze, Eye Blinking, Mouth Animation, and Microexpressions.

Areas: AR/VR Human Computer Interaction & UX

January 1, 2020

Ethics in Design and Communication

Virtual Reality (VR) designers accept the ethical responsibilities of removing a user’s entire world and superseding it with a fabricated reality. These unique immersive design challenges are intensified when virtual experiences become public and socially-driven. As female VR designers in 2018, we see an opportunity to fold the language of consent into the design practice of virtual reality—as a means to design safe, accessible, virtual spaces.

Publication will be made available in 2020.

Areas: AR/VR Human Computer Interaction & UX

December 16, 2019

IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing

Virtual Reality (VR) and its applications have attracted significant and increasing attention. However, the requirements of much larger file sizes, different storage formats, and immersive viewing conditions pose significant challenges to the goals of acquiring, transmitting, compressing and displaying high quality VR content. Towards meeting these challenges, it is important to be able to understand the distortions that arise and that can affect the perceived quality of displayed VR content. It is also important to develop ways to automatically predict VR picture quality. Meeting these challenges requires basic tools in the form of large, representative subjective VR quality databases on which VR quality models can be developed and which can be used to benchmark VR quality prediction algorithms. Towards making progress in this direction, here we present the results of an immersive 3D subjective image quality assessment study.

Areas: AR/VR

December 15, 2019

Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT)

One of the challenges in the field of haptics is to provide meaningful and realistic sensations to users. While most real world tactile sensations are composed of multiple dimensions, most commercial product only include vibration as it is the most cost effective solution. To improve on this, we introduce VPS (Vibration, Pressure, Shear) display, a multi-dimensional tactile array that increases information transfer by combining Vibration, Pressure, and Shear similar to how RGB LED combines red, blue, and green to create new colors.

Areas: AR/VR

December 15, 2019

IEEE Transactions on Haptics

We present experimental results that demonstrate that rendering haptic cues with multi-sensory components—specifically, lateral skin stretch, radial squeeze, and vibrotactile stimuli—improved perceptual distinguishability in comparison to similar cues with all-vibrotactile components. These results support the incorporation of diverse stimuli, both vibrotactile and non-vibrotactile, for applications requiring large haptic cue sets.

Areas: AR/VR

December 1, 2019

IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing (TASLP)

In this paper, a new method for pre-processing HRTFs in order to reduce their effective order is presented. The method uses phase-correction based on ear alignment, by exploiting the dual-centering nature of HRTF measurements. In contrast to time-alignment, the phase-correction is performed parametrically, making it more robust to measurement noise. The SH order reduction and ensuing interpolation errors due to sparse sampling were analyzed for these two methods.

Areas: AR/VR