Steve Mann

Cayden Pierce, Steve Mann

Human memory prioritizes the storage and recall of information that is emotionally-arousing and/or important in a process known as value-directed memory. When experiencing a stream of information (e.g. conversation, book, lecture, etc.), the individual makes conscious and subconscious value assessments of the incoming information and uses this as a metric to determine what to remember. In order to improve automatic recall of memory, previous memory augmentation systems have sensed users' physiological state to determine which sensory media should be prioritized. Here, we propose to prioritize memories using the affective state of individuals that the user is interacting with. Thereby, the proposed wearable Affective Memory Augmentation system uses affective information from the user's social companions in order to facilitate value-directed memory.

Steve Mann, Cayden Pierce, Christopher Tong et al.

"Vironment" is a series of art pieces, social commentary, technology, etc., based on wearable health technologies of social-distancing, culminating in a social-distancing device that takes the familiar world of security and surveillance technologies that surround us and re-situates it on the body of the wearer (technologies that become part of us). This piece also introduces a conceptual framework for (1) the sensing of the self together with (2) sensing of others and (3) sensing of the environment around us.

Aman Bhargava, Alice X. Zhou, Adam Carnaffan et al.

The vibrations generated from scratching and tapping on surfaces can be highly expressive and recognizable, and have therefore been proposed as a method of natural user interface (NUI). Previous systems require custom sensor hardware such as contact microphones and have struggled with gesture classification accuracy. We propose a deep learning approach to scratch input. Using smartphones and tablets laid on tabletops or other similar surfaces, our system achieved a gesture classification accuracy of 95.8\%, substantially reducing gesture misclassification from previous works. Further, our system achieved this performance when tested on a wide variety of surfaces, mobile devices, and in high noise environments. The results indicate high potential for the application of deep learning techniques to natural user interface (NUI) systems that can readily convert large unpowered surfaces into a user interface using just a smartphone with no special-purpose sensors or hardware.

Steve Mann, Tom Furness, Yu Yuan et al.

The contributions of this paper are: (1) a taxonomy of the "Realities" (Virtual, Augmented, Mixed, Mediated, etc.), and (2) some new kinds of "reality" that come from nature itself, i.e. that expand our notion beyond synthetic realities to include also phenomenological realities. VR (Virtual Reality) replaces the real world with a simulated experience (virtual world). AR (Augmented Reality) allows a virtual world to be experienced while also experiencing the real world at the same time. Mixed Reality provides blends that interpolate between real and virtual worlds in various proportions, along a "Virtuality" axis, and extrapolate to an "X-axis". Mediated Reality goes a step further by mixing/blending and also modifying reality. This modifying of reality introduces a second axis. Mediated Reality is useful as a seeing aid (e.g. modifying reality to make it easier to understand), and for psychology experiments like Stratton's 1896 upside-down eyeglasses experiment. We propose Multimediated Reality as a multidimensional multisensory mediated reality that includes not just interactive multimedia-based reality for our five senses, but also includes additional senses (like sensory sonar, sensory radar, etc.), as well as our human actions/actuators. These extra senses are mapped to our human senses using synthetic synesthesia. This allows us to directly experience real (but otherwise invisible) phenomena, such as wave propagation and wave interference patterns, so that we can see radio waves and sound waves and how they interact with objects and each other. Multimediated reality is multidimensional, multimodal, multisensory, and multiscale. It is also multidisciplinary, in that we must consider not just the user, but also how the technology affects others, e.g. how its physical appearance affects social situations.