Augmenting Media Experiences with Affective Haptics

Within our Distributed and Interactive Systems research group, we focus on affective haptics, where we design and develop systems that can enhance human emotional states through the sense of touch. Such artificial haptic sensations can potentially augment and enhance our mind, body, and (virtual) social connections. In three works—voice...

Designing and Evaluating a VR Lobby for a Socially Enriching Remote Opera Watching Experience

The latest social VR technologies have enabled users to attend traditional media and arts performances together while being geographically removed, making such experiences accessible despite budget, distance, and other restrictions. In this work, we aim at improving the way remote performances are shared by designing and evaluating a VR...

Subjective and objective quality assessment for volumetric video

Volumetric video (VV) is a novel form of video that allows recreation of real-world scenes in 3D with users consuming the content from any viewpoint they desire. This makes VV best suited for augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR) applications. This freedom necessitates increased user interaction with the VV itself, which brings new...

Social virtual reality (VR) applications and user experiences

Virtual reality (VR) is the experience in a simulated interactive virtual space. It provides synthetic sensory feedback to users' actions that can physically and mentally immerse the users. Social VR is one type of VR system that allows multiple users to join a collaborative virtual environment and communicate with each other, usually by...

BreatheWithMe: Exploring Visual and Vibrotactile Displays for Social Breath Awareness during Colocated, Collaborative Tasks

Sharing breathing signals has the capacity to provide insights into hidden experiences and enhance interpersonal communication. However, it remains unclear how the modality of breath signals (visual, haptic) is socially interpreted during collaborative tasks. In this mixed-methods study, we design and evaluate BreatheWithMe, a prototype for...

The Co-Creation Space: An Online Safe Space for Community Opera Creation

This work presents the Co-Creation Space, a multilingual platform for professional and community artists to 1) generate raw artistic ideas, and 2) discuss and reflect on the shared meaning of those ideas. The paper describes the architecture and the technology behind the platform, and how it was used to facilitate the communication process...

Tangible air: An Interactive Installation for Visualising Audience Engagement

This article presents an end-to-end system for capturing physiological sensor data and visualising it on a real-time graphic dashboard and as part of an art installation. More specifically, it describes an event where the level of engagement of the audience was measured by means of Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) sensors and of the presenter...