Breaking the Screen: Interaction Across Touchscreen Boundaries in Virtual Reality for Mobile Knowledge Workers.

Virtual Reality (VR) has the potential to transform knowledge work. One advantage of VR knowledge work is that it allows extending 2D displays into the third dimension, enabling new operations, such as selecting overlapping objects or displaying additional layers of information. On the other hand, mobile knowledge workers often work on established mobile devices, such as tablets, limiting interaction with those devices to a small input space. This challenge of a constrained input space is intensified in situations when VR knowledge work is situated in cramped environments, such as airplanes and touchdown spaces. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of interacting jointly between an immersive VR head-mounted display and a tablet within the context of knowledge work. Specifically, we 1) design, implement and study how to interact with information that reaches beyond a single physical touchscreen in VR; 2) design and evaluate a set of interaction concepts; and 3) build example applications and gather user feedback on those applications.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, ISMAR 202

ReconViguRation: Reconfiguring Physical Keyboards in Virtual Reality.

Physical keyboards are common peripherals for personal computers and are efficient standard text entry devices. Recent research has investigated how physical keyboards can be used in immersive head-mounted display-based Virtual Reality (VR). So far, the physical layout of keyboards has typically been transplanted into VR for replicating typing experiences in a standard desktop environment. In this paper, we explore how to fully leverage the immersiveness of VR to change the input and output characteristics of physical keyboard interaction within a VR environment. This allows individual physical keys to be reconfigured to the same or different actions and visual output to be distributed in various ways across the VR representation of the keyboard. We explore a set of input and output mappings for reconfiguring the virtual presentation of physical keyboards and probe the resulting design space by specifically designing, implementing and evaluating nine VR-relevant applications: emojis, languages and special characters, application shortcuts, virtual text processing macros, a window manager, a photo browser, a whack-a-mole game, secure password entry and a virtual touch bar. We investigate the feasibility of the applications in a user study with 20 participants and find that, among other things, they are usable in VR. We discuss the limitations and possibilities of remapping the input and output characteristics of physical keyboards in VR based on empirical findings and analysis and suggest future research directions in this area

On the acoustic diffraction by the edges of benthic shells

Author Posting. © Acoustical Society of America, 2004. This article is posted here by permission of Acoustical Society of America for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 116 (2004): 239-244, doi:10.1121/1.1675813.Recent laboratory measurements of acoustic backscattering by individual benthic shells have isolated the edge-diffracted echo from echoes due to the surface of the main body of the shell. The data indicate that the echo near broadside incidence is generally the strongest for all orientations and is due principally to the surface of the main body. At angles well away from broadside, the echo levels are lower and are due primarily to the diffraction from the edge of the shell. The decrease in echo levels from broadside incidence to well off broadside is shown to be reasonably consistent with the decrease in acoustic backscattering from normal incidence to well off normal incidence by a shell-covered seafloor. The results suggest the importance of the edge of the shell in off-normal-incidence backscattering by a shell-covered seafloor. Furthermore, when considering bistatic diffraction by edges, there are implications that the edge of the shell (lying on the seafloor) can cause significant scattering in many directions, including at subcritical angles.This research was supported by the U.S. Office of Naval Research (Grant No. N00014-02-1-0095) and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), Woods Hole, MA

Using detergent to enhance detection sensitivity of African trypanosomes in human CSF and blood by Loop-Mediated Isothermal Amplification (LAMP)

<p><b>Background:</b> The loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) assay, with its advantages of simplicity, rapidity and cost effectiveness, has evolved as one of the most sensitive and specific methods for the detection of a broad range of pathogenic microorganisms including African trypanosomes. While many LAMP-based assays are sufficiently sensitive to detect DNA well below the amount present in a single parasite, the detection limit of the assay is restricted by the number of parasites present in the volume of sample assayed; i.e. 1 per µL or 103 per mL. We hypothesized that clinical sensitivities that mimic analytical limits based on parasite DNA could be approached or even obtained by simply adding detergent to the samples prior to LAMP assay.</p> <p><b>Methodology/Principal Findings:</b> For proof of principle we used two different LAMP assays capable of detecting 0.1 fg genomic DNA (0.001 parasite). The assay was tested on dilution series of intact bloodstream form Trypanosoma brucei rhodesiense in human cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) or blood with or without the addition of the detergent Triton X-100 and 60 min incubation at ambient temperature. With human CSF and in the absence of detergent, the LAMP detection limit for live intact parasites using 1 µL of CSF as the source of template was at best 103 parasites/mL. Remarkably, detergent enhanced LAMP assay reaches sensitivity about 100 to 1000-fold lower; i.e. 10 to 1 parasite/mL. Similar detergent-mediated increases in LAMP assay analytical sensitivity were also found using DNA extracted from filter paper cards containing blood pretreated with detergent before card spotting or blood samples spotted on detergent pretreated cards.</p> <p><b>Conclusions/Significance:</b> This simple procedure for the enhanced detection of live African trypanosomes in biological fluids by LAMP paves the way for the adaptation of LAMP for the economical and sensitive diagnosis of other protozoan parasites and microorganisms that cause diseases that plague the developing world.</p&gt

Sleeping sickness: the wake-up of translational biomarker research

Comunicaciones a congreso

Keep them alive! Design and Evaluation of the “Community Fostering Reference Model”

Firms host online communities for commercial purposes, for example in order to integrate customers into ideation for new product development. The success of these firm-hosted online communities depends entirely on the cooperation of a high number of customers that constantly produce valuable knowledge for firms. However, in practice, the majority of successfully implemented communities suffers from stagnation and even a decrease of member activities over time. Literature provides numerous guidelines on how to build and launch these online communities. While these models describe the initial steps of acquiring and activating a community base from scratch very well and explicitly, they neglect continuous member activation and acquistion after a successful launch. Against this background, the authors propose the Community Fostering Reference Model (CoFoRM), which represents a set of general procedures and instruments to continuously foster member activity. In this paper, the authors present the theory-driven design as well as the evaluation of the CoFoRM in a practical use setting. The evaluation results reveal that the CoFoRM represents a valuable instrument in the daily working routine of community managers, since it efficiently helps activating community members especially in the late phases of a community’s LifeCycle