Kai Kunze

Xiaru Meng, Yulan Ju, Yan He et al.

Live cultural experiences like concerts generate shared physiological arousal among audience members, a collective resonance that contributes to their emotional power. Recreating such experiences in virtual reality therefore requires not just audiovisual fidelity, but reproduction of this physiological dimension. Yet current VR evaluation methods rely on post-hoc self-reports that interrupt immersion and cannot capture moment-to-moment arousal dynamics. We propose cross-temporal physiological synchrony as an unobtrusive methodology for evaluating VR cultural recreations: measuring how closely a VR participant's arousal patterns align with those of the original live audience. In a two-phase study, we recorded electrodermal activity from 40 live concert attendees, then created three VR recreations with varying abstraction levels (realistic 360-degree video, mixed video-plus-visualization, and fully abstract physiological representations) and measured synchrony with 22 laboratory participants using Dynamic Time Warping. Contrary to assumptions favoring realism, abstract visualizations achieved the strongest synchrony with live audiences. During musical climaxes, the abstract condition maintained correlation while realistic video showed none. These findings suggest that abstract physiological representations may be more effective than realistic footage for evoking authentic collective engagement in VR cultural recreations.

Kanyu Chen, Rebecca Panskus, Erwin Wu et al.

Vocal training is difficult because the muscles that control pitch, resonance, and phonation are internal and invisible to learners. This paper investigates how Electromyography (EMG) and ultrasonic imaging (UI) can make these muscles observable for training purposes. We report three studies. First, we analyze the EMG and UI data from 16 singers (beginners, experienced & professionals), revealing differences among three vocal groups of the muscle control proficiency. Second, we use the collected data to create a system that visualizes an expert's muscle activity as reference. This system is tested in a user study with 12 novices, showing that EMG highlighted muscle activation nuances, while UI provided insights into vocal cord length and dynamics. Third, to compare our approach to traditional methods (audio analysis and coach instructions), we conducted a focus group study with 15 experienced singers. Our results suggest that EMG is promising for improving vocal skill development and enhancing feedback systems. We conclude the paper with a detailed comparison of the analyzed modalities (EMG, UI and traditional methods), resulting in recommendations to improve vocal muscle training systems.

Stephan Sigg, Kai Kunze, Xiaoming Fu

Ubiquitous sensing is tightly coupled with activity recognition. This survey reviews recent advances in Ubiquitous sensing and looks ahead on promising future directions. In particular, Ubiquitous sensing crosses new barriers giving us new ways to interact with the environment or to inspect our psyche. Through sensing paradigms that parasitically utilise stimuli from the noise of environmental, third-party pre-installed systems, sensing leaves the boundaries of the personal domain. Compared to previous environmental sensing approaches, these new systems mitigate high installation and placement cost by providing a robustness towards process noise. On the other hand, sensing focuses inward and attempts to capture mental activities such as cognitive load, fatigue or emotion through advances in, for instance, eye-gaze sensing systems or interpretation of body gesture or pose. This survey summarises these developments and discusses current research questions and promising future directions.