Jean-Philippe Rivière

Jean-Philippe Rivière, Roman Malo, Sarah Varlin Grassi et al.

Occasionally, individuals immersed in a Virtual Reality (VR) environment may experience distractions that disrupt their sense of presence, a phenomenon referred to as a break in presence (BIP). Better understanding BIPs is crucial to designing VR applications that keep their users present. BIPs have been studied using a variety of methods, exploring their origins or trying to detect them from physiological or behavioral measurements. However, despite the importance of understanding how they are actually lived and managed by VR users, very few studies focused on their phenomenological characterization. We employed micro-phenomenology to collect the descriptions of BIPs experienced by users (n=14) of a height exposure VR application. We precisely modeled 57 BIP episodes, bringing to light a variety of experiences and behaviors. Four generic diachronic patterns of BIP episodes emerge: reflected-upon, discarded, self-preservation, and contradictory mediation BIPs. We discuss these in light of the PI/Psi model of presence, propose an awareness-based definition of BIPs, as well as three BIP-related design opportunities.

Modan Tailleur, Vincent Lostanlen, Jean-Philippe Rivière et al.

Oxygenators, alarm devices, and footsteps are some of the most common sound sources in a hospital. Detecting them has scientific value for environmental psychology but comes with challenges of its own: namely, privacy preservation and limited labeled data. In this paper, we address these two challenges via a combination of edge computing and cloud computing. For privacy preservation, we have designed an acoustic sensor which computes third-octave spectrograms on the fly instead of recording audio waveforms. For sample-efficient machine learning, we have repurposed a pretrained audio neural network (PANN) via spectral transcoding and label space adaptation. A small-scale study in a neonatological intensive care unit (NICU) confirms that the time series of detected events align with another modality of measurement: i.e., electronic badges for parents and healthcare professionals. Hence, this paper demonstrates the feasibility of polyphonic machine listening in a hospital ward while guaranteeing privacy by design.