Immersive and Wearable Thermal Rendering for Augmented Reality

In augmented reality (AR), where digital content is overlaid onto the real world, realistic thermal feedback has been shown to enhance immersion. Yet current thermal feedback devices, heavily influenced by the needs of virtual reality, often hinder physical interactions and are ineffective for immersion in AR. To bridge this gap, we have identified three design considerations relevant for AR thermal feedback: indirect feedback to maintain dexterity, thermal passthrough to preserve real-world temperature perception, and spatiotemporal rendering for dynamic sensations. We then created a unique and innovative thermal feedback device that satisfies these criteria. Human subject experiments assessing perceptual sensitivity, object temperature matching, spatial pattern recognition, and moving thermal stimuli demonstrated the impact of our design, enabling realistic temperature discrimination, virtual object perception, and enhanced immersion. These findings demonstrate that carefully designed thermal feedback systems can bridge the sensory gap between physical and virtual interactions, enhancing AR realism and usability.

Affective State Detection using fNIRs and Machine Learning

Affective states regulate our day to day to function and has a tremendous effect on mental and physical health. Detection of affective states is of utmost importance for mental health monitoring, smart entertainment selection and dynamic workload management. In this paper, we discussed relevant literature on affective state detection using physiology data, the benefits and limitations of different sensors and methods used for collecting physiology data, and our rationale for selecting functional near-infrared spectroscopy. We present the design of an experiment involving nine subjects to evoke the affective states of meditation, amusement and cognitive load and the results of the attempt to classify using machine learning. A mean accuracy of 83.04% was achieved in three class classification with an individual model; 84.39% accuracy was achieved for a group model and 60.57% accuracy was achieved for subject independent model using leave one out cross validation. It was found that prediction accuracy for cognitive load was higher (evoked using a pen and paper task) than the other two classes (evoked using computer bases tasks). To verify that this discrepancy was not due to motor skills involved in the pen and paper task, a second experiment was conducted using four participants and the results of that experiment has also been presented in the paper.

A Survey of Brain Computer Interface Using Non-Invasive Methods

Research on Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) began in the 1970s and has increased in volume and diversified significantly since then. Today BCI is widely used for applications like assistive devices for physically challenged users, mental state monitoring, input devices for hands-free applications, marketing, education, security, games and entertainment. This article explores the advantages and disadvantages of invasive and non-invasive BCI technologies and focuses on use cases of several non-invasive technologies, namely electroencephalogram (EEG), functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), Near Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRs) and hybrid systems.

A Novel Loss Function Utilizing Wasserstein Distance to Reduce Subject-Dependent Noise for Generalizable Models in Affective Computing

Emotions are an essential part of human behavior that can impact thinking, decision-making, and communication skills. Thus, the ability to accurately monitor and identify emotions can be useful in many human-centered applications such as behavioral training, tracking emotional well-being, and development of human-computer interfaces. The correlation between patterns in physiological data and affective states has allowed for the utilization of deep learning techniques which can accurately detect the affective states of a person. However, the generalisability of existing models is often limited by the subject-dependent noise in the physiological data due to variations in a subject's reactions to stimuli. Hence, we propose a novel cost function that employs Optimal Transport Theory, specifically Wasserstein Distance, to scale the importance of subject-dependent data such that higher importance is assigned to patterns in data that are common across all participants while decreasing the importance of patterns that result from subject-dependent noise. The performance of the proposed cost function is demonstrated through an autoencoder with a multi-class classifier attached to the latent space and trained simultaneously to detect different affective states. An autoencoder with a state-of-the-art loss function i.e., Mean Squared Error, is used as a baseline for comparison with our model across four different commonly used datasets. Centroid and minimum distance between different classes are used as a metrics to indicate the separation between different classes in the latent space. An average increase of 14.75% and 17.75% (from benchmark to proposed loss function) was found for minimum and centroid euclidean distance respectively over all datasets.