The Effect of Haptic Feedback on Basic Social. Interaction within Shared Virtual Environments

This paper describes an experiment that studies the effect of basic haptic feedback in creating a sense of social interaction within a shared virtual environment (SVE). Although there have been a number of studies investigating the effect of haptic feedback on collaborative task performance, they do not address the effect it has in inducing social presence. The purpose of this experiment is to show that haptic feedback enhances the sense of social presence within a mediated environment. An experiment was carried out using a shared desktop based virtual environment where 20 remotely located couples who did not know one another had to solve a puzzle together. In 10 groups they had shared haptic communication through their hands, and in another group they did not. Hence the haptic feedback was not used for completing the task itself, but rather as a means of social interacting – communicating with the other participant. The results suggest that basic haptic feedback increases the sense of social presence within the shared VE

Impaired perceptual learning in a mouse model of Fragile X syndrome is mediated by parvalbumin neuron dysfunction and is reversible.

To uncover the circuit-level alterations that underlie atypical sensory processing associated with autism, we adopted a symptom-to-circuit approach in the Fmr1-knockout (Fmr1-/-) mouse model of Fragile X syndrome. Using a go/no-go task and in vivo two-photon calcium imaging, we find that impaired visual discrimination in Fmr1-/- mice correlates with marked deficits in orientation tuning of principal neurons and with a decrease in the activity of parvalbumin interneurons in primary visual cortex. Restoring visually evoked activity in parvalbumin cells in Fmr1-/- mice with a chemogenetic strategy using designer receptors exclusively activated by designer drugs was sufficient to rescue their behavioral performance. Strikingly, human subjects with Fragile X syndrome exhibit impairments in visual discrimination similar to those in Fmr1-/- mice. These results suggest that manipulating inhibition may help sensory processing in Fragile X syndrome

An Introduction to 3D User Interface Design

3D user interface design is a critical component of any virtual environment (VE) application. In this paper, we present a broad overview of three-dimensional (3D) interaction and user interfaces. We discuss the effect of common VE hardware devices on user interaction, as well as interaction techniques for generic 3D tasks and the use of traditional two-dimensional interaction styles in 3D environments. We divide most user interaction tasks into three categories: navigation, selection/manipulation, and system control. Throughout the paper, our focus is on presenting not only the available techniques, but also practical guidelines for 3D interaction design and widely held myths. Finally, we briefly discuss two approaches to 3D interaction design, and some example applications with complex 3D interaction requirements. We also present an annotated online bibliography as a reference companion to this article

The Analysis of design and manufacturing tasks using haptic and immersive VR - Some case studies

The use of virtual reality in interactive design and manufacture has been researched extensively but the practical application of this technology in industry is still very much in its infancy. This is surprising as one would have expected that, after some 30 years of research commercial applications of interactive design or manufacturing planning and analysis would be widespread throughout the product design domain. One of the major but less well known advantages of VR technology is that logging the user gives a great deal of rich data which can be used to automatically generate designs or manufacturing instructions, analyse design and manufacturing tasks, map engineering processes and, tentatively, acquire expert knowledge. The authors feel that the benefits of VR in these areas have not been fully disseminated to the wider industrial community and - with the advent of cheaper PC-based VR solutions - perhaps a wider appreciation of the capabilities of this type of technology may encourage companies to adopt VR solutions for some of their product design processes. With this in mind, this paper will describe in detail applications of haptics in assembly demonstrating how user task logging can lead to the analysis of design and manufacturing tasks at a level of detail not previously possible as well as giving usable engineering outputs. The haptic 3D VR study involves the use of a Phantom and 3D system to analyse and compare this technology against real-world user performance. This work demonstrates that the detailed logging of tasks in a virtual environment gives considerable potential for understanding how virtual tasks can be mapped onto their real world equivalent as well as showing how haptic process plans can be generated in a similar manner to the conduit design and assembly planning HMD VR tool reported in PART A. The paper concludes with a view as to how the authors feel that the use of VR systems in product design and manufacturing should evolve in order to enable the industrial adoption of this technology in the future

Paper-based Mixed Reality Sketch Augmentation as a Conceptual Design Support Tool

This undergraduate student paper explores usage of mixed reality techniques as support tools for conceptual design. A proof-of-concept was developed to illustrate this principle. Using this as an example, a small group of designers was interviewed to determine their views on the use of this technology. These interviews are the main contribution of this paper. Several interesting applications were determined, suggesting possible usage in a wide range of domains. Paper-based sketching, mixed reality and sketch augmentation techniques complement each other, and the combination results in a highly intuitive interface

Evaluation of behavior in transgenic mouse models to understand human congenital pain conditions

BACKGROUND: Containing a brain for signal processing and decision making, and a peripheral component for sensation and response, the nervous system provides higher organisms a powerful method of interacting with their environment. The specific neurons involved in pain sensation are known as nociceptors and are the source of normal nociceptive pain signaling to prompt appropriate responses. Though acute hypersensitization can be advantageous by encouraging an organism to allow an injured area to heal, chronic pain conditions can be pathological and can markedly reduce quality of life. While a variety of genes have been associated with congenital pain conditions, two rare cases examined in this study have not had their mutated genes identified. Potassium voltage-gated channel subfamily H member 8, or KCNH8, is involved in regulating action potential production and propagation, and has not been linked with pain processing of any kind to date. Here, a male patient evaluated at Boston Children’s Hospital contains a novel single-base KCNH8 mutation and possesses an extremely low sensitivity to cold temperatures and mechanical pain, but a higher sensitivity to warmer temperatures. A separate protein, intersectin-2, or ITSN2, normally functions in clathrin-mediated endocytosis and exocytosis. A second patient at Boston Children’s Hospital expresses a previously-unseen point mutation in ITSN2 and experiences erythromelalgia, characterized by episodes of intense pain and red, swollen limbs during ambient warm temperatures. Through the use of Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)/Cas9 genome editing, this study will produce these specific genetic mutations in mouse lines to explore their effects on mammalian behavior. OBJECTIVES: This project employs two transgenic mouse models to study the behavioral phenotypes associated with rare potentially damaging mutations in KCNH8 and ITSN2 exhibited in the human patients. Through these experiments, a greater understanding of neural pain signaling and sensitivity changes can occur. METHODS: The differences in temperature preference of KCNH8 and ITSN2 mutant mice compared to wild type mice lacking these mutations was studied using thermal plates under cold and warm conditions. Direct application of acetone and von Frey filaments to mouse paws was used to study cold and mechanical sensitivity. Further testing of stamina, anxiety, coordination, and strength were also evaluated. RESULTS: A marked decrease in sensitivity to von Frey stimulation (p<0.01) and acetone administration (p<0.05) was observed in KCNH8 mutant mice. Thermal preference testing demonstrated a decreased preference for warmer temperatures as compared to wild type mice. In addition, anxiety levels were also observed to be slightly higher in these mutant KCNH8 mice (p<0.05). The mutant ITSN2 mice spent less time at cooler temperatures, though surprisingly they significantly preferred warmer conditions as compared to their wild type littermates. A full and partial reversal of these temperature preferences was demonstrated in cold and heat thermal conditions respectively after intraperitoneal gabapentin injection, which normalized the mice toward wild type behavior. CONCLUSIONS: Data from the KCNH8 mutant mouse model indicates an aversion to warmer temperatures and a decreased ability to detect cold or mechanical pressure, much like the human patient. The mutant ITSN2 mice were less likely to spend time at cooler temperatures, indicating heightened sensory sensitivity, but their preference for warmer temperatures suggests a possible desensitization of the affected nociceptors. These results often mirror the patient’s phenotype, but the preference for ambient warmer environments appears opposite to the patient. As the ITSN2 mice feel discomfort at cooler temperatures, a proposed desensitization at warmer temperatures would result in a more comfortable environment and could explain the observed preference. The trends toward normal neural firing rates achieved through gabapentin injection suggest that the aberrant responses in mutant ITSN2 mice is due to altered sensitization, but additional examination under these conditions with a larger group of mice is necessary to further unravel these signaling pathways. However, these extremely encouraging data introduce two new molecular targets for acute pain control

Effect of Tactile Feedback on Performance

Humans interact with their environment by obtaining information from various modalities of sensing. These various modalities of sensing combine to facilitate manipulation and interaction with objects and the environment. The way humans interact with computers mirrors this environmental interaction with the absence of feedback from the tactile channel. The majority of computer operation is completed visually because currently, the primary feedback humans receive from computers is through the eyes. This strong dependence on the visual modality can cause visual fatigue and fixation on displays, resulting in errors and a decrease in performance. Distributing tasks and information across sensory modalities could possibly solve this problem. This study added tactile feedback to the human computer interface through vibration of a mouse to more accurately reflect a human\u27s multi-sensory interaction with their environment. This investigation used time off target to measure performance in a pursuit-tracking task. The independent variables were type of feedback with two levels, (i.e., tactile feedback vs no tactile feedback) and speed of target at three different levels, (i.e., slow, medium, and fast). Tactile feedback improved pursuit-tracking performance by 6%. Significant main effects where found for both the speed and feedback factors, but no significant interaction between speed and feedback was obtained. This improvement in performance was consistent with previous research, and lends further support to the advantages multimodal feedback may have to offer man-machine interfaces

Generating indicative-informative summaries with SumUM

We present and evaluate SumUM, a text summarization system that takes a raw technical text as input and produces an indicative informative summary. The indicative part of the summary identifies the topics of the document, and the informative part elaborates on some of these topics according to the reader's interest. SumUM motivates the topics, describes entities, and defines concepts. It is a first step for exploring the issue of dynamic summarization. This is accomplished through a process of shallow syntactic and semantic analysis, concept identification, and text regeneration. Our method was developed through the study of a corpus of abstracts written by professional abstractors. Relying on human judgment, we have evaluated indicativeness, informativeness, and text acceptability of the automatic summaries. The results thus far indicate good performance when compared with other summarization technologies