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A projected virtual hand interface, which visually extends the arms of users using projection images, enables wheelchair users to reach unreachable objects; however, its projection area is usually ...

Human body augmentation makes it possible to obtain new abilities that we cannot achieve with our actual bodies. A projected virtual hand interface is a promising approach for body augmentation because it can extend a user’s reach in daily life without the need to wear a device. Although users can manipulate a projected virtual hand as if it were their own hand and can interact with distant objects through it, they cannot feel the sensation of touch when the projected virtual hand is overlaid on a real object. In this paper, we propose a novel pseudo-haptic feedback framework to provide users with the tactile texture of objects without the use of haptic devices. We designed three types of visual effects that produce unevenness, slipperiness, and softness. The experimental results indicate that the proposed visual effects can lead users to feel the intended tactile sensation. Furthermore, the visual effects provide users with tactile sensations with three to five levels of intensity without producing a strange feeling.

Everyday life hinges on smell, taste, and temperature-based experiences, from eating to detecting potential hazards (e.g., smell of rotten food, microbial threats, and non-microbial threats such as from hazardous gases) to responding to thermal behavioral changes. These experiences are formative as visceral, vital signals of information, and contribute directly to our safety, well-being, and enjoyment. Despite this, contemporary technology mostly stimulates vision, audition, and – more recently – touch, unfortunately leaving out the senses of smell taste and temperature. In the last decade, smell, taste, and temperature interfaces have gained a renewed attention in the field of Human Computer Interaction, fueled by the growth of virtual reality and wearable devices. As these modalities are further explored, it is imperative to discuss underlying cultural contexts of these experiences, how researchers can robustly stimulate and sense these modalities, and in what contexts such multisensory technologies are meaningful. This workshop addresses these topics and seeks to provoke critical discussions around chemo- and thermo-sensory HCI.

This paper proposes a human olfactory interface that modulates airborne odors and enables the users to selectively sniff only the odors that they want. Air containing odors is collected and exposed onto plural types of adsorbents for separation and concentration of odorous substances contained in the odors. The desorbed substances from the adsorbents are mixed at different ratios from the original odors for modulation. This paper describes preliminary work on the evaluation of separation performance of odorous substances in adsorption process. As a provisional target, two kinds of odorous substances, 1-Nonanol and (−)-Carvone, were selected. 1-Nonanol smells like citronella oil and (−)-Carvone smells like spearmint. An odor generated by mixing these two substances smells a similar odor of (\(+\))-Carvone which smells like sweet caraway. In order to separate each substance from the mixture, adsorbents were selected based on the molecular diameters and adsorption capability. Sensory tests with the triangle test were conducted to assess the separation capability of the selected adsorbents. An expected performance was not observed. More detail investigation including quantitative measurement with a gas chromatography will be needed for future work.

Olfaction is notorious as a vague and ambiguous sense. Some researches proposed a method that takes advantage of the feature to present more kinds of odors than the actual number of fragrances. However, it is still unclear what kind of factors affect the optimization of olfactory modulation. This paper investigated the effect of differences in methods to present heat sensation including presentation setups, areas, and positions of heat sensation. The heat sensation is stimulated by air flow and metal contact with a fan heater or a Peltier device. The heat sensation is presented to either apex of nose, philtrum, left cheek, or right cheek. In the experiment, the subjects were instructed to answer the scores to the odor of R-(+)-limonene and the odorless air presented with heat sensation compared to the odor impressions at room temperature by Likert scale questionnaire for the 8 adjective pairs. The experimental results suggested that the perceived odor impressions of R-(+)-limonene differed strongly depending on the presentation methods other than the presented temperature and humidity. In particular, presenting in a large area around the nose are considered more capable of modulating odor perception than the other methods.

We report a mobile robot that can effectively follow a chemical trail laid on the floor. Three metal-oxide gas sensors are mounted on the robot to detect its position with respect to the chemical trail, and four fans are aligned around each gas sensor. The effects of the airflows generated by the fans are two-fold. First, the airflows that impinge on the ground help bring the chemical vapor from a chemical trail to the gas sensors. Second, they serve as air curtains and prevent the gas sensors from responding to chemical vapor straying off to the side from the trail.

A projected virtual hand interface, which visually extends arms of users using projection images, enables wheelchair users to reach unreachable objects; however, its projection area is narrower than the reaching area required for the users. To address this problem, we propose a wheelchair system enhanced with a projected virtual hand that allows controlling a projection area using user’s head orientation. The proposed system estimates the current orientation of a user’s head and controls the pan and tilt of a projector accordingly to move a projection area considering the positional relationship with a projection plane. As users can operate the projection area simply by turning their head, this operation can be executed simultaneously with operations of a virtual hand using their hands. We propose a control model for projector rotation according to the user’s head direction. The conducted user experience study has revealed that the proposed method enables users to perform pointing tasks in a shorter time compared with the existing method, and moreover, it has acceptable interface usability.

Here, we report on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations conducted to develop a chemical sample collection device inspired by crayfish. The sensitivity of chemical sensors can be improved when used with a sniffing device. By collecting fluid samples from the surroundings, all solute species are also collected for the sensor. Crayfish generate jet-like water currents for this purpose. Compared to simply sucking water, food smells dissolved in the surrounding water can be more efficiently collected using the inflow induced by the jet discharge because of the smaller decay of the inflow velocity with the distance. Moreover, the angular range of water sample collection can be adjusted by changing the directions of the jet discharge. In our previous work, a chemical sample collection device that mimics the jet discharge of crayfish has been proposed. Here, we report CFD simulations of the flow fields generated by the device. By carefully configuring the simulation setups, we have obtained simulation results in which the angular ranges of the chemical sample collection in real experiments is well reproduced. Although there are still some discrepancies between the simulation and experimental results, such simulations will facilitate the process of designing such devices.

Tremors, which refer the trembling or shaking of body parts, are caused by the involuntary contractions of muscles and are one of the most common movement disorders that often reduce individuals' the levels of the hand functions and also affect their independent body movements adversely. ``Extended Hand (EH)”is an augmented body technology, which visually extends the length of a user's arm by a spatial augmented reality. It could facilitate individuals whose reaching areas are limited by body movement disorders to interact with distant objects. However, the technology is currently limited, because any trembling of the hands contacting with the touch panel of the EH system is amplified, causing EH to shake in the physical world as well. To make EH benefit individuals whose hands and body are disabled by tremors, we proposed methods for stabilizing the movements and gestures of the EH to allow EH controlled steadily by their trembling hands. We developed a hand tremor simulator by which trembling hands interacting with EH were imitated, and investigated the effectiveness of stabilization methods by conducting a series of pointing and grasping experiments. The stabilization method composed of Kalman filter and Hysteresis was confirmed to be effective in reducing the unstable translation and unstable stationary state of EH, and the method combining the stabilization of the distances from the fingertips to their centroid and the analysis of the change in low frequency components of the touching areas effectively enable trembling hands to control the EH gestures steadily.

Here, we report the results of experiments conducted to see if human subjects can track a faint airborne odor plume with the help of an olfactory assist system that presents the amplified olfactory stimuli to the subjects. The system consists of a gas sensor and an odor generator. The sensor measures the concentration variations of a gaseous chemical compound wafting in the air. The odor generator presents the user with an odor with amplified concentration variations. Thus, the user of the olfactory assist system can virtually have an enhanced sense of smell. The odor with four different intensities is generated by the current olfactory assist mask system. We first describe the experiments conducted to confirm that the subjects can surely discriminate the different intensities of the presented odor. The results of gas-plume tracking experiments show that the olfactory assist system can make tracking of an aerial odor plume much easier, because it allows the user to check the spatial concentration variations of a faint odor.

In this paper, we propose to use a radial seven arm maze to study olfactory search behavior of crayfish. Crayfish can search for food using their chemical sense even if they are blindfolded. However, their behavioral mechanism has not been fully revealed, especially for the olfactory search under stagnant flow conditions. To investigate how crayfish determine the location of an odor source, we have prepared a seven arm maze with metal-mesh walls. A crayfish released in the maze is forced to make a choice among six directions to explore when it comes back to the central platform. Experimental results suggest that crayfish detect spatial distribution of olfactory stimuli using the chemoreceptors on their walking legs as well as those on their antennules.

In outdoor environments, fluctuating airflow and gas distribution make gas source localization (GSL) tasks difficult. In our research, we use neural networks (NNs) to overcome these difficulties by applying long short-term memory deep neural networks (LSTM-DNNs) to time series data taken from a gas sensor array and anemometer to estimate the position of a gas source. In this paper, we present NNs for GSL with the ability to use various length input data and estimate a gas source location each time-step. In doing so, we were able to estimate the location of a gas source within 40 time-steps (20 s) and achieved (using 300 time-steps) an estimation accuracy of 95%.

We present fARFEEL, a remote communication system that provides visuo-haptic feedback allows a local user to feel touching distant objects. The system allows the local and remote users to communicate by using the projected virtual hand (VH) for the agency of his/her own hands. The necessary haptic information is provided to the non-manipulating hand of the local user that does not bother the manipulation of the projected VH. We also introduce the possible visual stimulus that could potentially provide the sense of the body ownership over the projected VH.

Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory Neural Networks (CNN-LSTM) are a variant of recurrent neural networks (RNN) that can extract spatial features in addition to classifying or making predictions from sequential data. In this paper, we analyzed the use of CNN-LSTM for gas source localization (GSL) in outdoor environments using time series data from a gas sensor network and anemometer. CNN-LSTM is used to estimate the location of a gas source despite the challenges created from inconsistent airflow and gas distribution in outdoor environments. To train CNN-LSTM for GSL, we used temporal data taken from a 5 &times, 6 metal oxide semiconductor (MOX) gas sensor array, spaced 1.5 m apart, and an anemometer placed in the center of the sensor array in an open area outdoors. The output of the CNN-LSTM is one of thirty cells approximating the location of a gas source. We show that by using CNN-LSTM, we were able to determine the location of a gas source from sequential data. In addition, we compared several artificial neural network (ANN) architectures as well as trained them without wind vector data to estimate the complexity of the task. We found that ANN is a promising prospect for GSL tasks.