Alvaro CassinelliCity University of Hong Kong | CityU · School of Creative Media
Alvaro Cassinelli
PhD & Engineering diploma
About
108
Publications
28,674
Reads
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787
Citations
Introduction
Additional affiliations
June 2017 - present
University of Tokyo
Position
- Researcher
June 2016 - present
SinergiaTech
Position
- Managing Director
Education
September 1996 - September 2000
University of Paris XI (IOTA, Lab. Charles Fabry, CNRS).
Field of study
- Physics/Optics
September 1995 - September 1996
University of Paris XI/ENST/Ecole Polytechnique
Field of study
- Laser and Matter Interaction
September 1993 - November 1996
Institut Mines-Télécom (Telecom ParisTech)
Field of study
- Télécommunication · Ing.
Publications
Publications (108)
We present a novel Virtual Reality (VR) life review therapy system. Life review therapy is an intervention used by clinical psychologists, counselors, and social workers for patients under palliative care to systematically examine various life experiences to resolve conflicts and complete life tasks. The goal of the therapy is to narrativize the pa...
Very distinct strategies can be deployed to recognize and characterize an unknown environment or a shape. A recent and promising approach, especially in robotics, is to reduce the complexity of the exploratory units to a minimum. Here, we show that this frugal strategy can be taken to the extreme by exploiting the power of statistical geometry and...
Introduction: As the global population continues to age, the demand for palliative care is progressively increasing. This growing trend highlights the pressing need for groundbreaking interventions that can effectively manage palliative symptoms and improve the quality of end-of-life care. We present a brief, structured, personalized, and innovativ...
Mixed Reality (MR) techniques, such as Virtual (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR), are gaining popularity as a new methodology for neuroscience and psychology research. In studies involving audiovisual stimuli, it is crucial to have MR systems that can deliver these bimodal stimuli with controlled timing between the onset of each modality. However, th...
This paper introduces a novel arousal-based virtual reality (VR) neurofeedback meditation system based on Buddhist visualization techniques, which generates meditation imagery based on the users state of physiological arousal. Therapists have increasingly incorporated mindfulness-based VR meditation systems into their interventions to treat a wide...
Figure 1: Chenrezig Sadhana VR: User's view of the virtual meditation chamber in the arousal-based virtual reality neurofeedback system based on Buddhist visualization practices. ABSTRACT This paper introduces a novel arousal-based virtual reality (VR) neurofeedback meditation system based on Buddhist visualization techniques, which generates medit...
This paper introduces a novel arousal-based virtual reality (VR) neurofeedback meditation system based on Buddhist visualization techniques, which generates meditation imagery based on the users' state of physiological arousal. Therapists have increasingly incorporated mindfulness-based VR meditation systems into their interventions to treat a wide...
Very distinct strategies can be deployed to recognize and characterize an unknown environment or a shape. A recent and promising approach, especially in robotics, is to reduce the complexity of the exploratory units to a minimum. Here, we show that this frugal strategy can be taken to the extreme by exploiting the power of statistical geometry and...
“The power sector is the largest source of the government revenue and the premier contributor to the countryʼs gross domestic product. [...]
Power generation in Bhutan relies almost exclusively on hydropower. The total installed capacity of existing hydropower plants is 1,488 megawatt
(MW). Since all of the existing plants are run-of-the-river type...
Damping is usually associated with irreversibility. Here, we present a counterintuitive concept to achieve time reversal of waves propagating in a lossless medium using a transitory dissipation pulse. Applying a sudden and strong damping in a limited time generates a time-reversed wave. In the limit of a high damping shock, this amounts to “freezin...
3D modelling and printing are becoming increasingly popular. However, beginners often face high barriers of entry when trying to use existing 3D modelling tools, even for creating simple objects. This is further complicated on mobile devices by the lack of direct manipulation in the Z dimension. In this paper, we explore the possibility of using fo...
Augmented Reality (AR) overlays computer-generated visual, auditory or other sensory information onto the real world. Due to recent technological advancement in the field, it can become increasingly difficult for the user to differentiate between sensory information coming from real and virtual objects, leading to interesting perceptual phenomena....
In this paper we introduce novel Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) treatments to improve the psychological well being of patients in palliative care, based on interviews with a clinical psychologist who has successfully implemented VR assisted interventions on palliative care patients in the Hong Kong hospital system. Our VR and AR as...
Augmented Reality (AR) overlays computer-generated visual, auditory or other sensory information on the real world. Due to recent advancements in AR it can be difficult for the user to differentiate between sensory information coming from real and virtual objects, leading to interesting phenomena. For example, an AR experience in which users can ex...
Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are an underestimated public health threat. It impairs children's brain development, immune system, and hormonal systems. These impairments predispose children to various chronic mental and physical diseases. However, its negative impacts are not widely known by the general public. Chang Liu created a mixed real...
A remarkable result from integral geometry is Cauchy’s formula, which relates the mean path length of ballistic trajectories randomly crossing a convex 2D domain, to the ratio between the region area and its perimeter. This theorem has been generalized for non-convex domains and extended to the case of Brownian motion to find many applications in v...
The study of bio-mechanics allows us to infer measurements for every day objects without needing measurement tools. A limitation of this comes from the complex mental transformations of space involved. The efficiency of this task degrades the larger these measurements become. We present B-Handy, a system that offloads this mental workload by provid...
A remarkable result from integral geometry is Cauchy's formula, which relates the mean path length of ballistic trajectories randomly crossing a convex 2D domain, to the ratio between the region area and its perimeter. This theorem has been generalized for non-convex domains and extended to the case of Brownian motion to find many applications in v...
In this paper, we report on our experiment to investigate the extent to which the human body reacts to virtual thermal stimuli presented in Augmented Reality (AR). Our AR experience enables users to see and hear their own hands burning while looking through a Video See-Through Head-Mounted Display (VST-HMD). We hypothesized that this AR experience...
This proposal is for the creation and annotation of an egocentric video data set of hazardous cycling situations. The resulting data set will facilitate projects to improve the safety and experience of cyclists. Since cyclists are highly sensitive to road surface conditions and hazards they require more detail about road conditions when navigating...
Figure 1: We present Project Esky, an eXtended Reality (XR) framework that enables high fidelity XR content on any hardware configuration. A) A user wearing an OST-HMD with a 6DOF head tracker, hand tracker, and PC is able to develop high fidelity experiences with hand-gesture interactions. B) An image through the lens of the OST-HMD, showing a use...
This demonstration showcases a complete Open-Source Augmented
Reality (AR) modular platform capable of high fidelity natural handinteractions with virtual content, high field of view, and spatial
mapping for environment interactions. We do this via several live
desktop demonstrations. Finally, included in this demonstration is
a completed open sour...
“Globally, it is estimated that up to 1 billion children aged 2–17 years, have experienced physical, sexual, emotional violence and neglect” [1], and 30% of the abused child is likely to develop Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) [2]; 354 million adult war survivors are suffering from PTSD [3]; At where the natural disaster occurred, 70.7% of su...
Can interactive Augmented Reality (AR) experiences induce involuntary sensations through additional modalities? In this paper we report on our AR experience that enables users to see and hear their own hands burning while looking through a Video See-Through Head-Mounted Display (VST-HMD). In an exploratory study (n = 12, within-subject design), we...
Accurate 3D registration of real and virtual objects is a crucial step in AR, especially when manipulating those objects in space. Previous work simplifies mid-air 3D manipulations by removing one or more degrees of freedom by constraining motion using automatic algorithms. However, when designing objects, limiting the user’s actions can affect the...
Visually disabled people increasingly use computers in everyday life, thanks to novel assistive technologies better tailored to their cognitive functioning. Like sighted people, many are interested in computer games – videogames and audio-games. Tactile-games are beginning to emerge. The Tactile Radar is a device through which a visually disabled p...
Displacements of large objects induced by vibration are a common occurrence, but the motion is generally unpredictable. Think for instance of an unbalanced front-loading washing machine. For controlled movement, wheels or legs are usually preferred.
In this work, we explore a strategy for moving everyday objects by introducing or harvesting random...
Latest hardware improvements on transceivers supporting Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) make it feasible to connect small battery powered devices hundred of meters or even km away. In this paper, we propose a physical computing paradigm fully exploiting this novel technology. Spatial physical computing (SPC) leverages not only natural manipula...
This article reports on two art-science collaborations, A-me: Augmented Memories and BrainCloud, that interrogate the central role of localization in neuroscience—including the use of technologies that augment sociability using localization as a central reference point. The two projects result from a series of interactions where a science/technolog...
An Egyptian statue on display at the Manchester Museum mysteriously spins on its axis every day; it is eventually discovered that this is due to anisotropic friction forces, and that the motile power comes from imperceptible mechanical waves caused by visitors' footsteps and nearby traffic. This phenomena involves microscopic ratchets, and is perva...
In recent years, Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) have gained
considerable commercial traction, with Facebook acquiring Oculus VR for \$2
billion, Magic Leap attracting more than \$500 million of funding, and
Microsoft announcing their HoloLens head-worn computer. Where is humanity
headed: a brave new dystopia-or a paradise come true...
Individuals lacking or having impaired vision face serious difficulties during autonomous locomotion. Sensory substitution devices can contribute to alleviate such difficulties, significantly (and measurably) reducing anxiety. The present paper evaluates a device – the Tactile Radar (TR) – that can detect obstacles at a certain distance from the us...
We describe and demonstrate a pair of diopter-adjustable eyeglasses aimed to correct presbyopia; the glasses provide a tunable optical power in the whole surface of the lens cell, eliminating the optical distortion typical of bifocal/trifocal or progressive glasses. The wearer can actively control the optical power by a simple sliding gesture on th...
Though we live in the era of the touchscreen (tablet PCs and smart phones providing a rigid and flat interface) people and the industry are getting excited about the world of tangible 3D interfaces. This may be explained for two reasons: first, the emergence of cheap vision-based gestural interfaces conquering the space above and below the screen (...
Recent advances in neuroimaging over the last 15 years leaded to an explosion of knowledge in neuroscience and to the emergence of international projects and consortiums. Integration of existing knowledge as well as efficient communication between scientists are now challenging issues into the understanding of such a complex subject [Yarkoni et al....
A-me is a fictitious memory-evoking apparatus at the intersection of science, art and technology. The system enables users to experience other people's memories as well as store their own by interacting with a volumetric representation (MR) of a human brain. The user retrieves or stores memories (audio traces) by pointing and clicking at precise vo...
Demo Hour highlights new prototypes and projects that exemplify innovation and novel forms of interaction. Audrey Desjardins, Editor
This workshop provides a forum for discussing emerging trends in interactive surfaces that leverage alternative display types and form factors to enable more expressive interaction with information. The goal of the workshop is to push the current discussion forward towards a synthesis of emerging visualization and interaction concepts in the area o...
Mobile and ubiquitous systems create opportunities for new kinds of interactivity in public spaces. Examples of human-technology interactions in public spaces include interactive displays on different scales; mobile systems enabling projection in public environments; smart interactive and reactive objects; tangible interfaces; and public media arts...
Recent developments in computer vision hardware have popularized the use of (free hand) gestures as well as full body posture as a form of input control in commercial gaming applications. However, the computer screen remains the place where the eyes must be placed at all times. Freeing graphic output from that rectangular cage is a hot topic in Spa...
The Light Arrays project explores the extension of the body through an array of visible light beams projecting on the environment a dynamic representation of the body, its movement and posture. Interestingly, these light cues are visible both for the user wearing the device as well as for others. The result is an experiential bridge between what we...
"scoreLight" and "scoreBots" are two experimental platforms for performative sound design and manipulation. Both are essentially synesthetic interfaces - synesthetic musical instruments - capable of translating free-hand drawings into a sonic language of beats and pitches, all in real time. While scoreLight uses a modified "smart" laser scanner to...
We study here a wearable device capable of translating bio-sensed data into cartoon-like graphics projected in the physical surround-ing. We hypothesize that such 'expressive laser aura' (LA) may serve for biofeedback purposes; more interestingly, as the display extends past the wearer's intimate/personal space it can comple-ment non-verbal communi...
A "restless interface" challenges, in a way as subtle as possible, the passive attitude of the computer user. The prototype introduced here detects bad static postures, and produce a subtle feedback which does not interfere with the workflow: the cursor will drift if the person is not sitting up-right in a neutral position.
mail on a pizza box (right) and virtual birds on the wall (left). Abstract— Direct interaction with everyday objects augmented with artificial affordances is clearly a very efficient approach leveraging natural human interaction capabilities. Hence the idea of conceiving ubiquitous computing as an invisible world which can be "condensed" on real ob...
A modified laser projector capable of displaying over all kind of non-prepared surfaces, while simultaneously using the beam (at the same or different wavelength/polarization) as a LIDAR probe gathering information about that surface’s position, orientation and shape, texture and spectral reflectance. This information can then be used to modify the...
Recently the miniaturization of mobile devices has progressed and such devices are difficult to have input interface that has wide operation area on their surface. Conventional input interface on a cell phone, such as a touch panel or keypad, has limited operation area. There has been many approaches to handle this problem, but they require users t...
The 'Smart Laser Projector' (SLP) is a modified laser-based projector capable of displaying while simultaneously using the laser beam (at the same or different wavelength or polarization) as a LIDAR probe gathering information about the projection surface (its borders, 3d shape, relative position and orientation, as well as fine texture and spectra...
We propose a variant of the multi-touch display technology that introduces an original way of manipulating three-dimensional data. The underlying metaphor is that of a deformable screen that acts as a boundary surface between the real and the virtual worlds. By doing so, the interface can create the illusion of continuity between the user's real sp...
scoreLight is a playful musical instrument capable of gen-erating sound from the lines of drawings as well as from the edges of three-dimensional objects nearby (including every-day objects, sculptures and architectural details, but also the performer's hands or even the moving silhouettes of dancers). There is no camera nor projector: a laser spot...
We introduce here our latest 'smart laser projector' prototype, i.e, a modified laser-based projector capable of augmenting all kind of surfaces while simultaneously using the laser as a scanning beam used for gathering information about that surface shape, texture, re-flectivity, relative motion, etc. 'Augmenting' surfaces (including tables, deskt...
scoreLight is a musical instrument capable of generating sound from the lines of doodles as well as the contours of three-dimensional objects (hands, silhouettes, architectural details). There is no camera or projector: a laser spot explores the shape just as a pick-up head searches for sound over the surface of a vinyl record, with the significant...
The Volume Slicing Display enables interactive exploration of volumetric data (for example, medical images) using a piece of plexiglass (or paper) that functions both as a control interface and a passive, untethered projection screen.
We present here a first prototype of the Virtual Haptic Radar (VHR), a wearable device helping actors become aware of the presence of invisible virtual objects in their path when evolving in a virtual studio (such as a "bluescreen" filming stage [Figure 1]). The VHR is a natural extension of the Haptic Radar (HR) and its principle [Cassinelli et al...