Human-Computer Interation  

Human emotion can be transferred by technology that stimulates different parts of the hand without making physical contact with your body, according to a new study.

Human emotion can be transferred by technology that stimulates different parts of the hand without making physical contact with your body, a University of Sussex-led study has shown.

Sussex scientist Dr. Marianna Obrist, Lecturer at the Department of Informatics, has pinpointed how next-generation technologies can stimulate different areas of the hand to convey feelings of, for example, happiness, sadness, excitement or fear.

For example, short, sharp bursts of air to the area around the thumb, index finger and middle part of the palm generate excitement, whereas sad feelings are created by slow and moderate stimulation of the outer palm and the area around the ‘pinky’ finger.

The findings, which will be presented at the CHI 2015 conference in South Korea, provide “huge potential” for new innovations in human communication, according to Dr Obrist.

According to Obrist, "Imagine a couple that has just had a fight before going to work. While she is in a meeting she receives a gentle sensation transmitted through her bracelet on the right part of her hand moving into the middle of the palm. That sensation comforts her and indicates that her partner is not angry anymore.

“These sensations were generated in our experiment using the Ultrahaptics system.

“A similar technology could be used between parent and baby, or to enrich audio-visual communication in long-distance relationships.

“It also has huge potential for ‘one-to-many’ communication – for example, dancers at a club could raise their hands to receive haptic stimulation that enhances feelings of excitement and stability.”

Using the Ultrahaptics system – which enables creating sensations of touch through air to stimulate different parts of the hand – one group of participants in the study was asked to create patterns to describe the emotions evoked by five separate images: calm scenery with trees, white-water rafting, a graveyard, a car on fire, and a wall clock. The participants were able to manipulate the position, direction, frequency, intensity and duration of the stimulations.

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A second group then selected the stimulations created by the first group that they felt best described the emotions evoked by the images. They chose the best two for each image, making a total of 10.

Finally, a third group experienced all 10 selected stimulations while viewing each image in turn and rated how well each stimulation described the emotion evoked by each image.

The third group gave significantly higher ratings to stimulations when they were presented together with the image they were intended for, proving that the emotional meaning had been successfully communicated between the first and third groups.

Now Obrist has been awarded £1 million by the European Research Council for a five-year project to expand the research into taste and smell, as well as touch.

The SenseX project will aim to provide a multisensory framework for inventors and innovators to design richer technological experiences.

Obrist said, “Relatively soon, we may be able to realise truly compelling and multi-faceted media experiences, such as 9-dimensional TV, or computer games that evoke emotions through taste.

“Longer term, we will be exploring how multi-sensory experiences can benefit people with sensory impairments, including those that are widely neglected in Human-Computer Interaction research, such as a taste disorder.”



SOURCE  University of Sussex

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 Human-Computer Interaction  

A newly announced DARPA program explores ways to assemble complex ideas from elementary ones given language and context. The US defense research agency's Communicating with Computers (CwC) program aims to develop technology to turn computers into good communicators and may even help with cancer research.

The lifelong human imperative to communicate is so strong that people talk not only to other people but also to their pets, their plants and their computers. Unlike pets and plants, computers might one day reciprocate. DARPA's new Communicating with Computers (CwC) program aims to develop technology to turn computers into good communicators.

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Straightforward as that may sound, communication involves several coordinated processes. The speaker puts ideas into words, the listener extracts ideas from words and, importantly, both rely on context to narrow down the possible meanings of ambiguous language. All of these processes are challenging for machines.

"Human communication feels so natural that we don't notice how much mental work it requires," said Paul Cohen, DARPA program manager. "But try to communicate while you're doing something else –the high accident rate among people who text while driving says it all– and you'll quickly realize how demanding it is."

"Today we view computers as tools to be activated by a few clicks or keywords, in large part because we are separated by a language barrier. The goal of CwC is to bridge that barrier, and in the process encourage the development of new problem-solving technologies."

Human-machine communication falls short of the human-human standard, where speakers and listeners consider such contextual aspects as what has been said already, the purposes of the communication, the best ways to express ideas, who they are speaking with, prevailing social conventions and the availability of other modes of expression such as gestures. And so computers that might otherwise contribute more significantly to solving problems in a range of areas, including national security, remain in relatively simplistic roles such as crunching large datasets and providing driving directions.

To further the goal of developing systems that communicate more like people do, the CwC program will set tasks in which humans and machines must communicate to do a job. One task will involve collaborative story-telling, in which a human and a machine will take turns contributing sentences until they have written a short story. "This is a parlor game for humans, but a tremendous challenge for computers," said Cohen. "To do it well, the machine must keep track of the ideas in the story, then generate an idea about how to extend the story and express this idea in language."

Another CwC task will be to build computer-based models of the complicated molecular processes that cause cells to become cancerous. Computers are starting to do this already in DARPA's Big Mechanism program, but they don't work collaboratively with human biologists—a shortcoming, because while machines read more quickly and widely than humans, they do not read as deeply, and while machines can generate vast numbers of molecular models, humans are better judges of the biological plausibility of those proposed models.

Of course, storytelling and cancer research are just initial challenges to help advance the technology to a point where humans and machines can take best advantage of their complementary capabilities. In the intelligence-gathering domain, for example, machines’ superior ability to collect and store information and humans’ superior ability to develop interpretive narratives from such information would find greater synergy if the people and the machines could communicate better.

“Because humans and machines have different abilities, collaborations between them might be very productive. But today we view computers as tools to be activated by a few clicks or keywords, in large part because we are separated by a language barrier,” Cohen said. “The goal of CwC is to bridge that barrier, and in the process encourage the development of new problem-solving technologies."


SOURCE  DARPA

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 Human-Computer Interface  

University of California, San Diego researchers have demonstrated a new user interface technology: electronic recording and replay of human touch.

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego report a breakthrough in technology that could pave the way for digital systems to record, store, edit and replay information in a dimension that goes beyond what we can see or hear: touch.

“Touch was largely bypassed by the digital revolution, except for touch-screen displays, because it seemed too difficult to replicate what analog haptic devices – or human touch – can produce,” said Deli Wang, a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) in UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering.

“But think about it: being able to reproduce the sense of touch in connection with audio and visual information could create a new communications revolution.”

In addition to uses in health and medicine, the communication of touch signals could have far-reaching implications for education, social networking, e-commerce, robotics, gaming, and military applications, among others. The sensors and sensor arrays reported in the paper are also fully transparent (see optical image of transparent ZnO TFT sensor array at right), which makes it particularly interesting for touch-screen applications in mobile devices.

The research has been published in Scientific Reports.

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The tactile feedback display system demonstrated in the article has some of real-time reproduction and modification of touch contact with temporal and spatial resolutions. Over the last few years, there has been significant progress on the development of flexible and sensitive pressure sensors, as well as tactile feedback displays for specific applications such as for remote palpation that could be used during laparoscopic surgery.


“Our sense of touch plays a significant role in our daily lives, particularly in personal interaction, learning and child development, and that is especially true for the development of preemies,” said Nguyen, another senior author of this Scientific Reports paper. “We were approached by colleagues in the UC San Diego School of Medicine’s neonatology group to see if there was a way to record a session of a mother holding the baby, which could be replayed at a different time in an incubator.”

In their paper, the researchers reported the electronic recording of touch contact and pressure using an active-matrix pressure sensor array made of transparent zinc-oxide (ZnO), thin-film transistors (TFTs). The companion tactile feedback display used an array of diaphragm actuators made of an acrylic-based dielectric elastomer with the structure of an interpenetrating polymer network (IPN). The polymer actuators’ actuation – the force and level of displacement – are modulated by adjusting both the voltage and charging time.

One of the critical challenges in developing touch systems is that the sensation is not one thing. It can involve the feeling of physical contact, force or pressure, hot and cold, texture and deformation, moisture or dryness, and pain or itching. “It makes it very difficult to fully record and reproduce the sense of touch,” said Wang.

The ability to digitize the touch contact enables direct remote transfer of touch information, long-term memory storage, and replay at a later time. “In addition, with the ability to reproduce and change the feeling of touch with both temporal and spatial resolutions make it possible to produce synthesized touch,” said UC San Diego’s Wang. “It could create experiences that do not exist in nature, as we have done with computer-generated imagery and synthesized music.”




SOURCE  UC San Diego

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