Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) improves the reading speed for optimizing the user's information processing capabilities on Virtual Reality (VR) devices. Yet, the user's RSVP reading performance changes over time while the reading speed remains static. In this paper, we evaluate pupil dilation as a physiological metric to assess the mental workload of readers in real-time. We assess mental workload under different background lighting and RSVP presentation speeds to estimate the optimal color that discriminates the pupil diameter varying RSVP presentation speeds. We discovered that a gray background provides the best contrast for reading at various presentation speeds. Then, we conducted a second study to evaluate the classification accuracy of mental workload for different presentation speeds. We find that pupil dilation relates to mental workload when reading with RSVP. We discuss how pupil dilation can be used to adapt the RSVP speed in future VR applications to optimize information intake.

Smart home devices with their sophisticated sensing technologies raise many privacy concerns. In most cases, they only function when fully connected to the internet in which case privacy exposure is greatest. Users currently have to either accept these privacy risks or remove devices from the internet or power plug, rendering them useless. Our demo is based on recent work advocating for advanced smart device configuration options across a spectrum of connectivity control options. We introduce a model ecosystem with four connectivity levels and a privacy label that informs about connectivity-feature trade-offs across those four modes. The presented ecosystem introduces two functional smart devices and demonstrates intuitively how configuration decisions impact information flow.