Animacy is central to HRI, as it is critical for perceptions of intentionality and influences acceptance, interaction quality, and trust. In order to better understand the underlying mechanisms of the sense of animacy and its role in HRI, we conducted an experiment (n=13) using a social robotic object that is ambiguous with respect to its perceived animacy. We examined how brain activity related to a subjective animacy rating of the robot by participants after watching it perform simple gestures. Using functional imaging, we found that the ventral occipitotemporal (VOT) cortex, a region known to distinguish animate from inanimate entities, also responds to robots along this same organizational gradient. In an exploratory analysis, activity in the left VOT was associated with the individual differences in participants’ subjective animacy rating of the robot. This extends established principles of animacy perception to non-humanoid robots and suggests that individual differences in brain responses may shape how robots are experienced. We discuss implications for HRI, including guiding social cue design, informing gesture alignment with robot roles, and raising ethical considerations around attachment and trust.

We present the development process, design considerations and generalized system engineering for the ThermalSense sensory substitution system. The system utilizes visual-to-auditory sensory substitution to convey thermal properties through auditory cues. In an online proof of concept study evaluating the system, participants demonstrated a high level of accuracy in recognizing and localizing thermal information which is otherwise invisible in visual scenes. The ability of users to gain proficiency within a short training period was accompanied by a positive user experience evaluation. These results provide an indication of the system’s potential to enable an extended sense, serving as an extension of visual perception to the range of thermal information beyond its natural capacities. The proposed system architecture, together with these findings, set the ground for the further development of this and similar systems, as well as general advances in the study of sensory perception.

This paper introduces a new approach to sound source localization using head-related transfer function (HRTF) characteristics, which enable precise full-sphere localization from raw data. While previous research focused primarily on using extensive microphone arrays in the frontal plane, this arrangement often encountered limitations in accuracy and robustness when dealing with smaller microphone arrays. Our model proposes using both time and frequency domain for sound source localization while utilizing Deep Learning (DL) approach. The performance of our proposed model, surpasses the current state-of-the-art results. Specifically, it boasts an average angular error of 0.24° and an average Euclidean distance of 0.01 meters, while the known stateof-the-art gives average angular error of 19.07° and average Euclidean distance of 1.08 meters. This level of accuracy is of paramount importance for a wide range of applications, including robotics, virtual reality, and aiding individuals with cochlear implants (CI).

In Virtual Reality (VR), a growing number of applications involve verbal communications with avatars, such as for teleconference, entertainment, virtual training, social networks, etc. In this context, our paper aims to investigate how tactile feedback consisting in vibrations synchronized with speech could influence aspects related to VR social interactions such as persuasion, co-presence and leadership. We conducted two experiments where participants embody a first-person avatar attending a virtual meeting in immersive VR. In the first experiment, participants were listening to two speaking virtual agents and the speech of one agent was augmented with vibrotactile feedback. Interestingly, the results show that such vibrotactile feedback could significantly improve the perceived co-presence but also the persuasiveness and leadership of the haptically-augmented agent. In the second experiment, the participants were asked to speak to two agents, and their own speech was augmented or not with vibrotactile feedback. The results show that vibrotactile feedback had again a positive effect on co-presence, and that participants perceive their speech as more persuasive in presence of haptic feedback. Taken together, our results demonstrate the strong potential of haptic feedback for supporting social interactions in VR, and pave the way to novel usages of vibrations in a wide range of applications in which verbal communication plays a prominent role.

One of the main challenges facing the practical utilization of new assistive technology for the blind is the process of training. This is true both for mastering the device and even more importantly for learning to use it in specific environments. Such training usually requires external help which is not always available, can be costly, and attempts to navigate without such preparation can be dangerous. Here we will demonstrate several games which were developed in our lab as part of the training programs for the EyeCane, which augments the traditional White-Cane with additional distance and angles. These games avoid the above-mentioned problems of availability, cost and safety and additionally utilize gamification techniques to boost the training process. Visitors to the demonstration will use these devices to perform simple in-game virtual tasks such as finding the exit from a room or avoiding obstacles while wearing blindfolds.

Graphical virtual environments are currently far from accessible to the blind as most of their content is visual. While several previous environment-specific tools have indeed increased accessibility to specific environments they do not offer a generic solution. This is especially unfortunate as such environments hold great potential for the blind, e.g., for safe orientation and learning. Visual-to-audio Sensory Substitution Devices (SSDs) can potentially increase their accessibility in such a generic fashion by sonifying the on-screen content regardless of the specific environment. Using SSDs also taps into the skills gained from using these same SSDs for completely different tasks, including in the real world. However, whether congenitally blind users will be able to use this information to perceive and interact successfully virtually is currently unclear. We tested this using the EyeMusic SSD, which conveys shape and color information, to perform virtual tasks otherwise not possible without vision. We show that these tasks can be accomplished by the congenitally blind.