Haptic feedback is used in cars to reduce visual inattention. While tactile feedback like vibration can be influenced by the car's movement, thermal and cutaneous push feedback should be independent of such interference. This paper presents two driving simulator studies investigating novel tactile feedback on the steering wheel for navigation. First, devices on one side of the steering wheel were warmed, indicating the turning direction, while those on the other side were cooled. This thermal feedback was compared to audio. The thermal navigation lead to 94.2% correct recognitions of warnings 200m before the turn and to 91.7% correct turns. Speech had perfect recognition for both. In the second experiment, only the destination side was indicated thermally, and this design was compared to cutaneous push feedback. The simplified thermal feedback design did not increase recognition, but cutaneous push feedback had high recognition rates (100% for 200 m warnings, 98% for turns).

Abstract A low‐cost prototyping environment for experimenting with embodied conversational agents is discussed. The platform allows modeling and experimenting with different agent constructs and protocols prior to significant investment in the construction of the agent environment. Problems in the design of such a platform include the substantial number of agent controls needed and the flexibility required to represent the constructs of different theories, protocols and target environments as they are introduced and developed. These problems are addressed by augmenting a movie clip manager with a general drawing palette as a design tool. The result is a prototyping environment which simulates multiple agents on a desktop while allowing arbitrary notational conventions. The current version does not render multiple agents in a shared virtual environment, but the protocol‐based architecture is amenable to such extensions. In the meantime, valuable results regarding the social character of multiple agent interaction can be explored with the existing tool. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper presents a design flow for the rapid prototyping of forward error correction (FEC) systems in the Xilinx System Generator tool. In this instance two FEC systems were tested, both Turbo codec's. One was designed to comply with the UMTS standard, the other was designed to comply with the cdma2000 standard. The target hardware for this system is a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The System Generator tool and the cdma2000 Turbo code standard are discussed. A description of the implemented test harness is given along with simulation results and a comparison of simulation times for both hardware and software implementations of the system.