Seminars

Communicating Embodied Experiences among People using Wearable Devices

While today’s tools allow us to communicate effectively with others via video and text, they leave out other critical communication channels, such as non-verbal cues and body language. These cues are important not only for face-to-face communication but even when communicating forces (muscle tension, movement, etc), feelings, and emotions, which are hard to share by using existing symbolic and graphical communication tools. This brings up my research question: how can we communicate our embodied experience among people? To tackle this challenge, we have been exploring the larger concept of changing our bodies into that of another person using wearable devices. In this talk, we introduce several concepts of sharing embodied experiences using wearable devices between users, such as between a physician and a patient, including people with neuromuscular diseases and even children, by means of virtual reality systems, exoskeletons, and electrical muscle stimulation. Lastly, we introduce how we can extend this concept to change our perception and cognition, such as preserving the sense of agency when voluntary and involuntary(machine) action is combined, and discuss its further possibilities and challenges for changing our perspectives toward different people.

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Reading in the 21st Century – How Emerging Technologies Empower and Challenge our Reading Behaviour

While writing and reading as cultural inventions date back to the 4th millennium BC, digital technologies have recently and fundamentally changed where, how, and what we read. The information age provides us with both opportunities and challenges, which affect our reading behaviour. Various devices are now available for reading, and their mobility provides us with unprecedented opportunities to engage with text anytime, anywhere. In his talk, Tilman Dingler—whose research focuses on technologies that augment human cognitive abilities—will present challenges, best practices, and future directions of ubiquitous technologies, including VR, to support reading activities. With examples from his research on reading interfaces, scheduling algorithms and cognition-aware systems, this talk will outline a research agenda for systems that provide better readability, prioritise information gain over attention capture, and instil better reading habits in their users.

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A 20-year mission for personal fabrication and a live demo of year four

In the first half of this talk, I will lay out a 20-year roadmap on how I think we should take personal fabrication from tech enthusiasts to regular consumers by following the path laid out by earlier media, such as desktop publishing (PDF). In the second half, I will give a live demo of how we apply this roadmap in the form of our laser cutting system "kyub" (project page). Kyub is designed to get users from idea to chair-size physical prototypes in one hour (video). This allows schools to design and manufacture furniture and musical instruments in the time frame of class time (video).

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Engaging Human Augmentation

The concept of engagement is far from unique to interactive systems. In colloquial use, it refers to a state of involvement or participation. When people are engaged, it means they are focused with their thoughts on an activity, instead on something else. Human augmentation is about augmenting human abilities by human-computer-integration to enhance and create new experiences as well as foster engagement. In this talk, I review the concept of engagement in interactive systems. I, then, discuss the challenge of assessing engagement along different projects in the health, safety and security as well as sports domain that have used human augmentation for different purposes. For that purpose, I present several different assessment methods and discuss their advantages and disadvantages. I will conclude with a summary and several future work directions.

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Extended Reality for Everybody

Michael's research focuses on democratizing virtual and augmented reality technologies, and on empowering more users to become active design participants. In his current work, he is focusing on how enabling more people to participate in design needs new methods and tools that better guide novice designers in addressing accessibility and equity as well as privacy and security directly through design. He will share current examples and is looking forward to a discussion around mechanisms that could promote "good" XR design behavior.

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Ubiquitous VR, Digital Twin, and Metaverse in the Age of AR3.0

Recently, VR/AR (or XR) is getting in the spotlight again. While there are deep concerns that XR is a bubble again, there is also great hope that XR will spread as a part of everyday life in the near future. XR can be the key to success when used in conjunction with DNA (data, network, AI), the core of the ‘Digital New Deal Project' led by the Korean government. In particular, it is worth paying attention to the possibility that the 'digital twin-based metaverse' linked with XR will become a new social platform. UVR Lab, launched in 2001, is preparing for a new leap forward in the era of AR3.0. In this talk, I would like to share my thoughts on the possibilities of AR3.0 and UVR3.0 on the way to the 3rd challenge for XR to become an everyday technology.

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Augmented Virtual Teleportation – Teleport into the Media

New Zealand is well known for its beautiful nature and has contributed to many movies and commercials. A strong media ecosystem has been built to support the related industry. This talk will introduce recent convergence of immersive, interactive, and intelligent media technologies, which presents a novel Cinematic XR platform allowing users’ illusion to teleport and interact with the objects in the video. The further extension of the platform with the high-speed network, Augmented Virtual Teleportation (AVT) is then introduced. It will be able to allow remote interaction and immersive collaboration with people in distance. Finally, case studies and potential applications of AVT will be introduced and discussed.

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Toward Extensions of the Self: Near-body Interactions for Augmented Humans

Augmenting the human intellect is one of the central goals in human-computer interaction. This can only be achieved when the time between intention and action becomes very small and the user sees the interface as an extension of the self. Wearable and mobile interaction devices supporting near-body interactions can fulfil this vision by reducing the time to access significantly. The talk will cover a number of my research projects that show how I tackle the challenges and potentials in that field such as limited out- and input capabilities, proximity of interaction devices to human sensors and actuators, and concerns regarding obtrusiveness and privacy.

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Ubiquitous Mixed Reality: Designing Mixed Reality Technology to Fit into the Fabric of our Daily Lives

Technological advancements in the fields of optics, display technology and miniaturization have enabled high-quality mixed reality (AR and VR) head-mounted displays (HMDs) to be used beyond research labs. This enables a novel interaction scenario where the context of use changes drastically and HMDs aim to become a daily commodity. In this talk I will present two perspectives onto AR/VR research in the field of HCI. The one perspective is aiming to improve the technology (e.g., input techniques, haptic devices) and work towards the vision of everyday usable mixed reality. The other perspective is starting to act like an auditing authority and challenging the constant positive perspective on the progress of mixed reality. While both perspectives have the goal of designing MR technology to fit into the fabric of our daily lives, I will argue that HCI research should not only focus on the positive framing. HCI should position itself stronger on the critical side and reflect upon the artifacts and concepts it creates, acting as an auditing authority on itself and other research in the field of AR and VR.

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Interactive Human Centered Artificial Intelligence – A Definition and Research Challenges

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become the buzzword of the last decade. Advances so far have been largely technical and only recently have we been seeing a shift towards focusing on human aspects of artificial intelligence. Particularly the notion of making AI interactive and explainable are in the center, which is a very narrow view. In the talk, I will suggest a definition for “Interactive Human Centered Artificial Intelligence” and outline the required properties to start a discussion on the goals of AI research and the properties that we should expect of future systems. It is central to be able to state who will benefit from a system or service. Staying in control is essential for humans to feel safe and have self-determination. I will discuss the key challenge of control and understanding of AI based systems and show that levels of abstractions and granularity of control are a potential solution. I further argue that AI and machine learning (ML) are very much comparable to raw materials (like stone, iron, or bronze). Historical periods are named after these materials as they have change what humans can build and what tools humans can engineer. Hence, I argue in the AI age we need to shift the focus from the material (e.g. the AI algorithms, as there will be plenty of material) towards the tools that are enabled and that are beneficial for humans. It is apparent that AI will allow the automation of mental routine tasks and that it will extend our ability to perceive things and foresee events. For me, the central question is how to create these tools for amplifying the human mind, without compromising human values.

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Integrating Interactive Devices with the Body

When we look back to the early days of computing, user and device were distant, often located in separate rooms. Then, in the ’70s, personal computers “moved in” with users. In the ’90s, mobile devices moved computing into users’ pockets. More recently, wearable devices brought computing into constant physical contact with the user’s skin. These transitions proved useful: moving closer to users allowed interactive devices to sense more of their user and act more personal. The main question that drives my research is: what is the next interface paradigm that supersedes wearable devices? The primary way researchers have been investigating this is by asking where future interactive devices will be located with respect to the user’s body. Many posit that the next generation of interfaces will be implanted inside the user’s body. However, I argue that their location with respect to the user’s body is not the primary factor; in fact, implanted devices are already happening in that we have pacemakers, insulin pumps, etc. Instead, I argue that the key factor is how will devices integrate with the user’s biological senses and actuators. This body-device integration allows us to engineer interactive devices that intentionally borrow parts of the body for input and output, rather than adding more technology to the body. For example, one such type of body-integrated devices, which I have advanced during my PhD, are interactive systems based on electrical muscle stimulation; these are able to move their user’s muscles using computer-controlled electrical impulses, achieving the functionality of exoskeletons without the bulky motors. Their smaller size, a consequence of this integration with the user’s body, enabled haptic feedback in scenarios previously not possible with existing devices. In my research group, we engineer interactive devices that integrate directly with the user’s body. We believe that these types of devices are the natural succession to wearable interfaces and allow us to investigate how interfaces will connect to our bodies in a more direct and personal way.

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Vision Augmentation: How see-through displays could overwrite our visual world via computation?

In this talk, I present our works on augmenting and enhancing our visual capability via augmented reality technology. Adding virtual information indistinguishable from reality has been a long-awaited goal in Augmented Reality (AR). While already demonstrated in the 1960ies, only recently optical see-through displays have seen a reemergence. Our group explores augmented vision, a subarea of human augmentation, that aims to assist our visual perception via AR displays. Keywords include augmented reality, human augmentation, see-through displays, and eye-tracking.

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Millimeter-wave radar for touchless interaction

Google’s Pixel 4 launched in fall 2019 with the first radar ever integrated into a smartphone, enabling gesture and presence sensing for new modes of user interaction. These sensing capabilities are powered by Soli, a miniaturized radar system designed and developed specifically for touchless interaction at Google Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP). In this talk, we discuss Soli’s development and productization path, from concept to core R&D to integration into Pixel 4. We highlight the tightly intertwined co-design of core radar technology, algorithms, and interaction design in Soli’s development, driven by requirements for a ubiquitous and scalable human sensing technology. We also discuss some of Soli’s new approaches and innovations in radar systems, signal processing, machine learning, and interaction design in order to enable a new modality for sensory perception. In the second part of the talk, we cover some of the technical challenges faced in integrating Soli radar into the Pixel 4 smartphone, including chip size and placement, power consumption, and interference. We discuss how our cross-disciplinary approaches to these challenges ultimately enabled Soli to successfully ship in the phone. Finally, we close with future-looking directions for radar in consumer devices. By capturing the sensitivity and precision of human movements in everyday user interfaces, we believe scalable millimeter-wave radar has the potential to revolutionize the way we interact with technology.

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Marvin or Terminator? The role of empathy in depression and aggression

Empathy, the capacity to share emotions or viewpoints of others to attain interpersonal reciprocity, can be a double-edged sword in relation to psychological wellbeing. Affective empathy is implicated as a mechanism inhibiting maladaptive aggression, yet dysregulated sharing of another’s emotional pain can exacerbate depression. On the other hand, being able to understand someone else’s emotions (without necessarily feeling them) or appreciating other perspectives (requiring cognitive flexibility) is the cornerstone of psychological resilience, protecting from both depressive and antisocial disorders. The current talk presents on some of the work from our lab on the role of empathy in depression and interpersonal aggression, and underpinning biological mechanisms (blood, guts and brains). Closely linked with this is the personality construct of psychopathy which is typically associated with poor empathy and increased risk for aggression. However, what happens when psychopathy meets empathy? We have discovered a novel psychological construct characterised by high empathy and dark traits: the Dark Empath which will be described relative to personality, aggression, and wellbeing.

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Novel Uses of Neurophysiological Signals in Extended Reality

This talk will present a few novel ways in which neurological sensors (e.g. EEG) and physiological sensors (e.g. ECG and GSR) are used in extended reality in both collaborative and single-user setups. I will present how our research has used these neurophysiological signals to measure performances, enabling empathy, and performing interaction in virtual environments.

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A New Vision for a Better Reality

Virtual reality is emerging as a vital teaching tool of our age.  Much of the seminal research in this field has been led by UW Professor Tom Furness over the 54 years of his professional career.  As an original pioneer of virtual and augmented reality technology Tom is widely known as the ‘grandfather’ of virtual reality.   In his talk Tom will share the lessons learned during the development of VR and its application.  He will focus on the need for reimagining education and his efforts to create a new learning environment for home through the Virtual World Society.

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Building bonds with robots and digital companions

Robots and digital humans are starting to be used for conversations in social, health, and business applications. It is important that rapport is built during these conversations, especially in healthcare contexts. This talk will look at some techniques that may build rapport as well as some barriers that need to be overcome.

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Combining BCI with Virtual/Augmented Reality: toward hybrid technologies and novel immersive applications

In this talk we will present our research path on Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI). We will first evoke the great success of OpenViBE, a software dedicated to BCI research used today all over the world, notably with VR systems. Then, we will illustrate how BCI and virtual reality technologies can be combined to design novel 3D interactions and effective applications, e.g. for health, sport, entertainment, or training.

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Superception – engineering the sense of self

Perception refers to recognizing meaning and organizing it into information via the inputs of sensory organs such as eyes, ears and somatosensory organs, as a basis for actions and constructing the self. How we can leverage our own perceptual ability and emerging technologies to overcome our intrinsic limitation of our own body? I am leading Superception: a research framework that makes it possible to expand, transform, and engineering human perception and cognition by intervening in human sensory input and output using computer technology. In this talk, I will present my recent work for engineering sense of self with technologies including Virtual Reality, EMS (electrical muscle stimulation), Projection mapping. I will also introduce current and future directions for augmenting the sense of self.

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Beyond AR / VR / HCI – Augmenting Humans?

This talk discusses potential ideas beyond traditional AR/VR/HCI fields, starting with an overview of wearable computing with a focus on smart eyewear, starting from interaction techniques, moving over topics of interpersonal synchrony, towards ideas on body schema extensions and embodied learning to steering collective attention.  Finally, I will introduce a couple of application cases extending our work towards Augmented Sports and Augmented Humans.

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Human Factors: Automation, Trust and Cognitive Load

This talk presents some of our work on Human Factors for health, safety and efficiency in critical task environments. Specifically, we are studying the relationship between systems (automation, decision support, AI/ML), human trust in these systems and cognitive load of system operators. Automation and autonomous systems, ranging from robotics, to decision support and other AI?ML based systems, are playing an increasingly important role in our lives. Our work aims at informing the design of such systems to improve human-system interaction and collaboration. automation, can assist human operators in performing their work, help reduce workload (in particular cognitive load) and allow the operator to attend to important tasks at hand. However, in order to be able to rely on these systems, the operators have to trust that they perform accurately. Problems may arise when undue over-trust or under-trust are exhibited by the operators. Developing a better understanding of how people build and calibrate trust and being able to measure the amount of trust they put in a system could allow us to better manage their expectations and improve their interaction with and reliance on a system.

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