Interactive light and sound table: an EPS@ISEP project

Interactive products are appealing objects in a technology-driven society and the offer in the market is wide and varied. Most of the existing interactive products only provide either light or sound experiences. Therefore, the goal of this project was to develop a product aimed for children combining both features. This project was developed by a team of four thirdyear students with different engineering backgrounds and nationalities during the European Project Semester at ISEP (EPS@ISEP) in 2012. This paper presents the process that led to the development of an interactive sound table that combines nine identical interaction blocks, a control block and a sound block. Each interaction block works independently and is composed of four light emitting diodes (LED) and one infrared (IR) sensor. The control is performed by an Arduino microcontroller and the sound block includes a music shield and a pair of loud speakers. A number of tests were carried out to assess whether the controller, IR sensors, LED, music shield and speakers work together properly and if the ensemble was a viable interactive light and sound device for children

Systems for pervasive electronics and interfaces

Energy Harvesting Active Networked Tags (EnHANTs) are a new type of wireless device in the domain between RFIDs and sensor networks. Future EnHANTs will be small, flexible, and self-powered devices that can be attached to everyday objects that are traditionally not networked to enable "Internet of Things" applications. This work describes the design and development of the EnHANT prototypes and testbed. The current prototypes use thin-film photovoltaics optimized for indoor light harvesting, form multihop networks using ultra-low-power Ultra-Wideband Impulse Radio (UWB-IR) transceivers, and implement energy harvesting adaptive networking protocols. The current testbed enables the evaluation of different algorithms by exposing individual prototypes to repeatable light conditions based on real-world irradiance data. New approaches to characterizing the energy available to energy harvesting devices were explored. A mobile data-logger was used to record the intensity of ambient light, determine the light source, and record the acceleration from motion during different real world activities. These traces were used to model the behavior of photovoltaic and inertial energy harvesters in real world deployments and can be replayed in the EnHANTs testbed. In addition, new techniques to evaluate the efficiency of different photovoltaic technologies under indoor illumination were developed. A proof-of-concept system was built to characterize photovoltaics under a standardized set of conditions in which the radiant intensity and spectral composition of the light source were systematically varied. Techniques to structure student research projects within the EnHANTs project were developed. Project-based learning approaches were implemented to engage students using real-world system development constraints. A survey of the students showed that this approach is an effective method for developing technical, professional, and soft skills. Open source hardware was also applied to EnHANTs project and extended into other domains. A laboratory-based class in flat panel display technology was developed. The course introduces fundamental concepts of display systems and reinforces these concepts through the fabrication of three display devices. A lab kit platform was developed to enable remote students to use low-cost, course specific hardware to complete the lab exercises remotely. This platform was also applied to external projects targeted at non-university students. A workshop was developed to teach artists, designers, and hobbyists how to design and build custom user interfaces using thin-film electronics and rapid prototyping tools. Surveys of the students and workshop participants showed that this platform is an effective teaching tool and can be easily adapted and expanded

Design of a Virtual Reality Scenario and Scent Generator for Sensory Training

A thesis presented to the faculty of the Elmer R. Smith College of Business and Technology at Morehead State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science by Yosselin Castro Islas on November 15, 2019

ECCE Toolkit: Prototyping Sensor-Based Interaction

Building and exploring physical user interfaces requires high technical skills and hours of specialized work. The behavior of multiple devices with heterogeneous input/output channels and connectivity has to be programmed in a context where not only the software interface matters, but also the hardware components are critical (e.g., sensors and actuators). Prototyping physical interaction is hindered by the challenges of: (1) programming interactions among physical sensors/actuators and digital interfaces; (2) implementing functionality for different platforms in different programming languages; and (3) building custom electronic-incorporated objects. We present ECCE (Entities, Components, Couplings and Ecosystems), a toolkit for non-programmers that copes with these issues by abstracting from low-level implementations, thus lowering the complexity of prototyping small-scale, sensor-based physical interfaces to support the design process. A user evaluation provides insights and use cases of the kind of applications that can be developed with the toolkit.This research project has been partially funded by the EU FP7 project meSch (Grant agreement 600851) and national Spanish project CREAx (TIN2014-56534-R). We thank participants of the TEI 2014 studio and the DEI Laboratory staff and students at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid for their valuable feedback

Construction and Evaluation of an Ultra Low Latency Frameless Renderer for VR.

© 2016 IEEE.Latency-the delay between a users action and the response to this action-is known to be detrimental to virtual reality. Latency is typically considered to be a discrete value characterising a delay, constant in time and space-but this characterisation is incomplete. Latency changes across the display during scan-out, and how it does so is dependent on the rendering approach used. In this study, we present an ultra-low latency real-time ray-casting renderer for virtual reality, implemented on an FPGA. Our renderer has a latency of 1 ms from tracker to pixel. Its frameless nature means that the region of the display with the lowest latency immediately follows the scan-beam. This is in contrast to frame-based systems such as those using typical GPUs, for which the latency increases as scan-out proceeds. Using a series of high and low speed videos of our system in use, we confirm its latency of 1 ms. We examine how the renderer performs when driving a traditional sequential scan-out display on a readily available HMO, the Oculus Rift OK2. We contrast this with an equivalent apparatus built using a GPU. Using captured human head motion and a set of image quality measures, we assess the ability of these systems to faithfully recreate the stimuli of an ideal virtual reality system-one with a zero latency tracker, renderer and display running at 1 kHz. Finally, we examine the results of these quality measures, and how each rendering approach is affected by velocity of movement and display persistence. We find that our system, with a lower average latency, can more faithfully draw what the ideal virtual reality system would. Further, we find that with low display persistence, the sensitivity to velocity of both systems is lowered, but that it is much lower for ours

16th Sound and Music Computing Conference SMC 2019 (28–31 May 2019, Malaga, Spain)

The 16th Sound and Music Computing Conference (SMC 2019) took place in Malaga, Spain, 28-31 May 2019 and it was organized by the Application of Information and Communication Technologies Research group (ATIC) of the University of Malaga (UMA). The SMC 2019 associated Summer School took place 25-28 May 2019. The First International Day of Women in Inclusive Engineering, Sound and Music Computing Research (WiSMC 2019) took place on 28 May 2019. The SMC 2019 TOPICS OF INTEREST included a wide selection of topics related to acoustics, psychoacoustics, music, technology for music, audio analysis, musicology, sonification, music games, machine learning, serious games, immersive audio, sound synthesis, etc