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Ultrasound haptic patterns can be rendered by continuously moving an ultrasonic focal point. It is not known how this focal point motion affects haptic perception. We present two psychophysical experiments investigating the perception of an ultrasound haptic focal point moving along a circular path. Our first experiment finds that a sensation of motion is perceived at speeds up to 17 revs–1, similar to the ‘flutter’ sensation. Our second experiment found a linear relationship between movement speed and perceived intensity up to this speed. Our findings give new insight into ultrasound haptic perception and give designers empirical evidence to inform contactless haptic feedback design.

This paper investigates the degree to which meeting success can be predicted through holistic, acoustic-prosodic measurements. The analyzed meetings are taken from the Parking Lot Corpus in which 70 groups of three to six students discuss the traffic situation at their university and come up with parking and transportation recommendations. The number, feasibility, and quality of these recommendations as well as the mean effectiveness and satisfaction ratings across group members provide the basis for correlations with three sets 15 acoustic-prosodic features that cover pitch, duration/timing, intensity, and the absolute frequencies of local events such as silent pauses. Results show that meeting success is, in fact, considerably correlated with the overall “sound” of the individual meetings, with pitch features being the most diverse and powerful predictors. In addition, we found that the “sound” of subjectively effective meetings differs from the “sound” of objectively productive meetings, i.e. meetings that generate a high output of feasible and/or high-quality recommendations. The prosodic feature patterns suggest that effective meetings are short and matter-of-fact, whereas the productive meetings are longer and have a lively speech melody that makes these meetings stimulating. We discuss the implications of our findings for future research and technological innovation.