Reverberation is a physical phenomena caused by room impulse reflection from walls, ceilings and other plane surfaces. When occurring in speech, it contributes an additive echo to the speech which is proportional to the geometry of the environment in which that speech was recorded. Reverberation is not just noise though, as the echo timing in speech affects its intelligibility as well as the listener's interpretation of the playback environment. It gives listeners a sense of the size, shape and materials of the room it is in. For communications scenarios where playback reverberation differs significantly from the visual display (e.g. speech recorded in a small room but played back in a cavernous virtual reality (VR) space), a psychoacoustic dissonance arises between visual and auditory perception. This paper presents an AI-based algorithm to remove source room reverberation impulse effects from speech. We then add reverberation to match the target playback environment. To assess effectiveness, we simulate a set of recording room geometries, and perform psychoacoustic assessment to estimate the effect on a human listener.

Navigating large-scale virtual spaces is a major challenge in Virtual Reality (VR) applications due to real-world spatial limitations. Walking-in-place (WIP) locomotion solutions may provide a natural approach for VR use cases that require locomotion to share similar qualities with walking in real-life. However, there is limited knowledge on the range of experiences across common WIP methods to inform the design of usable WIP solutions using consumer-accessible components. This paper contributes to this knowledge via a user study with 40 participants that experienced several easy-to-setup WIP methods in a VR commuting simulation. A nuanced understanding of cybersickness and exertion relationships and walking affordances based on different tracker setups were among the findings derived from a corroborated analysis of think-aloud, interview, and observational data, supplemented with self-reports of VR sickness, presence and flow. Practical design insights were then constructed along the dimensions of cybersickness, affordances, space and user interfaces.

The design, development and results from the deployment of a hand hygiene monitoring and reminder system is presented. The system is based on a dispenser equipped with low-energy Bluetooth technology which when coupled with a mobile application provides the basic location-awareness necessary to track the proximity of health-care worker to the dispenser. The system architecture provides the unique feature of selectively enabling the dispenser action in the smart dispenser only when the intended user is in its proximity. This feature is critical for deployment of hand sanitizer dispensers in hospital wards where there is apprehension in patients ingesting the sanitizer persists. The mobile application maintains an online database of the hand hygiene event records. The records are presented to administrators through a web-based dashboard for assessment and improvement of organizational hand-hygiene compliance levels. Preliminary quantitative results as well as qualitative results are presented and demonstrate the effectiveness of the system to serve as form of motivation for health care workers to improve their hand hygiene compliance.

Although small screen sizes and limited input methods are challenges for mobile devices, there are affordances like gestures and motion detection through on-device sensors. A prototype system has been implemented on a HTC Dream (T-Mobile G1) mobile phone demonstrating an "adaptive TV-channel" like mixed-initiative interface used to solicit user relevance feedback, provide recommendations and facilitate news video watching. The user is provided on-screen finger gesture operations to vote-up, vote-down or skip a video. Shaking the device resets the video sequence. This creates a cognitively palatable stream of videos and a seamless lower-latency user experience easily operated with one hand.

A system is being created with the aim of providing news video to mobile devices, focusing on using an "interactive TV-channel" metaphor as one of the possible interaction modes. The user is presented a sequence of recommended news video clips and a set of operations to vote-up or vote-down a video to indicate its relevance. User-machine synergy is harnessed through interaction with the clips, used to tailor subsequent media clip recommendations. A framework for delivering relevant news clips to a mobile device is being developed, and future work and challenges are discussed in further detail. The goal is to create a methodology for presenting a sequence of news video clips in a manner that is seamless and cognitively palatable through usermachine synergy, and switching between automated and manual modes as deemed necessary.