Mirror, Mirror, On The Wall: Collaborative Screen-Mirroring for Small Groups

Screen mirroring has been available to consumers for some time, however if every mobile device in the room supports screen mirroring to the main display (e.g. a shared TV), this necessitates a mechanism for managing its use. As such, this paper investigates allowing users in small intimacy groups (friends, family etc.) to self-manage mirrored use of the display, through passing/taking/requesting the display from whomever is currently mirroring to it. We examine the collaborative benefits this scheme could provide for the home, compared to existing multi-device use and existing screen mirroring implementations. Results indicate shared screen mirroring improves perceived collaboration, decreases dominance, preserves independence and has a positive effect on a group's activity awareness

I Am The Passenger: How Visual Motion Cues Can Influence Sickness For In-Car VR

This paper explores the use of VR Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) in-car and in-motion for the first time. Immersive HMDs are becoming everyday consumer items and, as they offer new possibilities for entertainment and productivity, people will want to use them during travel in, for example, autonomous cars. However, their use is confounded by motion sickness caused in-part by the restricted visual perception of motion conflicting with physically perceived vehicle motion (accelerations/rotations detected by the vestibular system). Whilst VR HMDs restrict visual perception of motion, they could also render it virtually, potentially alleviating sensory conflict. To study this problem, we conducted the first on-road and in motion study to systematically investigate the effects of various visual presentations of the real-world motion of a car on the sickness and immersion of VR HMD wearing passengers. We established new baselines for VR in-car motion sickness, and found that there is no one best presentation with respect to balancing sickness and immersion. Instead, user preferences suggest different solutions are required for differently susceptible users to provide usable VR in-car. This work provides formative insights for VR designers and an entry point for further research into enabling use of VR HMDs, and the rich experiences they offer, when travelling

Work-In-Progress Technical Report: Designing A Two-User, Two-View TV Display

This work-in-progress paper previews how we can design interfaces and interactions for multi-view TVs, enabling users to transition between independent and shared activities, gain casual awareness of others’ activities, and collaborate more effectively. We first compare an Android-based multi-user TV against both multi-screen and multi-view TVs in a collaborative movie browsing task, to determine whether multiview can improve collaboration, and what level of awareness of each other’s activity users choose. Based on our findings, we iterate on our multi-view design in a second study, giving users the ability to transition between casual and focused modes of engagement, and dynamically set their engagement with other users’ activities. This research demonstrates that the shared focal point of the TV now has the capability to facilitate both collaborative and completely independent activity

Examining the role of smart TVs and VR HMDs in synchronous at-a-distance media consumption

This article examines synchronous at-a-distance media consumption from two perspectives: How it can be facilitated using existing consumer displays (through TVs combined with smartphones), and imminently available consumer displays (through virtual reality (VR) HMDs combined with RGBD sensing). First, we discuss results from an initial evaluation of a synchronous shared at-a-distance smart TV system, CastAway. Through week-long in-home deployments with five couples, we gain formative insights into the adoption and usage of at-a-distance media consumption and how couples communicated during said consumption. We then examine how the imminent availability and potential adoption of consumer VR HMDs could affect preferences toward how synchronous at-a-distance media consumption is conducted, in a laboratory study of 12 pairs, by enhancing media immersion and supporting embodied telepresence for communication. Finally, we discuss the implications these studies have for the near-future of consumer synchronous at-a-distance media consumption. When combined, these studies begin to explore a design space regarding the varying ways in which at-a-distance media consumption can be supported and experienced (through music, TV content, augmenting existing TV content for immersion, and immersive VR content), what factors might influence usage and adoption and the implications for supporting communication and telepresence during media consumption

Ion implantation damage of silicon as observed by optical reflection spectroscopy in the 1 to 6 eV region

Optical reflection spectra of crystalline, sputtered, and ion implanted silicon specimens are presented. Characteristic aspects of the spectra of ion implanted specimens are related to lattice damage

Scaled Autonomy for Networked Humanoids

Humanoid robots have been developed with the intention of aiding in environments designed for humans. As such, the control of humanoid morphology and effectiveness of human robot interaction form the two principal research issues for deploying these robots in the real world. In this thesis work, the issue of humanoid control is coupled with human robot interaction under the framework of scaled autonomy, where the human and robot exchange levels of control depending on the environment and task at hand. This scaled autonomy is approached with control algorithms for reactive stabilization of human commands and planned trajectories that encode semantically meaningful motion preferences in a sequential convex optimization framework. The control and planning algorithms have been extensively tested in the field for robustness and system verification. The RoboCup competition provides a benchmark competition for autonomous agents that are trained with a human supervisor. The kid-sized and adult-sized humanoid robots coordinate over a noisy network in a known environment with adversarial opponents, and the software and routines in this work allowed for five consecutive championships. Furthermore, the motion planning and user interfaces developed in the work have been tested in the noisy network of the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Trials and Finals in an unknown environment. Overall, the ability to extend simplified locomotion models to aid in semi-autonomous manipulation allows untrained humans to operate complex, high dimensional robots. This represents another step in the path to deploying humanoids in the real world, based on the low dimensional motion abstractions and proven performance in real world tasks like RoboCup and the DRC

A national UK survey of peripatetic support teams for children and adults with intellectual and developmental disability who display challenging behaviour

Background: The service provision model of peripatetic support teams for people with intellectual disabilities who present challenging behaviour has been well established in the United Kingdom, with a small but growing evidence base. The current context in the UK would appear to indicate an ever-increasing role for such teams, in order to support people in their own communities and reduce the reliance on out-of-area placements. This study sought to establish the current position of such teams within the UK. Method and materials: 46 teams were given the opportunity to complete an online questionnaire regarding the team's day to day functioning. Results: 20 services responded to the survey providing a range of data. The results suggested that the services were mainly targeted towards adults, had a range of working practices and therapeutic orientations, with broadly successful outcomes (albeit self reported). The data would also suggest that this type of provision had diminished in recent years. Conclusions: The implications of the survey are discussed within the context of the current policy in the UK. In particular, the lack of provision for children, the use of evidence based practice and what appears to be a diminishing resource just at the time when it is most needed are explored

A Dose of Reality: Overcoming Usability Challenges in VR Head-Mounted Displays

We identify usability challenges facing consumers adopting Virtual Reality (VR) head-mounted displays (HMDs) in a survey of 108 VR HMD users. Users reported significant issues in interacting with, and being aware of their real-world context when using a HMD. Building upon existing work on blending real and virtual environments, we performed three design studies to address these usability concerns. In a typing study, we show that augmenting VR with a view of reality significantly corrected the performance impairment of typing in VR. We then investigated how much reality should be incorporated and when, so as to preserve users’ sense of presence in VR. For interaction with objects and peripherals, we found that selectively presenting reality as users engaged with it was optimal in terms of performance and users’ sense of presence. Finally, we investigated how this selective, engagement-dependent approach could be applied in social environments, to support the user’s awareness of the proximity and presence of others

I Am The Passenger: Challenges in Supporting AR/VR HMDs In-Motion

This video provides an overview of our research into the use of Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) in-car and in-motion. These immersive HMDs offer new possibilities for entertainment and productivity during travel. However, their use is confounded by motion sickness, caused in-part by the conflict between visually and physically perceived motion. Moreover, consumer HMDs cannot currently distinguish between the head motion of the wearer and rotations of the car. These problems represent significant impediments to their use in-motion, which our research aims to overcome