Antal Haans

Eindhoven University of Technology | TUE · Department of Industrial Engineering and Innovation Sciences

With the Internet of Things (IoT) becoming increasingly prevalent in people’s homes, new threats to residents are emerging such as the cyber-physical attack, i.e. a cyber-attack with physical consequences. In this study, we aimed to gain insights into how people experience and respond to cyber-physical attacks to their IoT devices. We conducted a n...

Affective haptic devices (AHDs) have been developed with the aim of communicating touch acts, symbolic messages, emotions, and/or providing a sense of social awareness. Within AHDs, three categories can be distinguished: mediated social touch (MST), symbolic communication systems, and awareness systems. For each of these categories, prototypes have...

The influence of urban lighting on the visual tasks of pedestrians are well known and, likewise, studies have explored the relationship between urban lighting and pedestrians’ feelings of safety. But there are other, less investigated, possible effects of light in mesopic situations. Research on street lighting for pedestrians has traditionally foc...

The impact of street lighting on the visual tasks of pedestrians is well known, as are studies that have explored the relationship between street lighting and pedestrians’ feelings of safety. But there are other, less investigated, possible effects of light in mesopic situations. Research on street lighting for pedestrians has traditionally focused...

Routing choices of walking pedestrians in geometrically complex environments are regulated by the interplay of a multitude of factors such as local crowding, (estimated) time to destination, (perceived) comfort. As individual choices combine, macroscopic traffic flow patterns emerge. Understanding the physical mechanisms yielding macroscopic traffi...

Affective haptic devices (AHDs) are communication technologies utilizing the sense of touch, and include mediated social touch (MST), symbolic haptic messaging, and awareness systems that, for example, let one feel another person's heartbeat. The COVID-19 pandemic and consequent social distancing measures have led to a reemphasis of the importance...

Current research on street lighting for pedestrians is heavily focused on visual performance. We argue that more research is needed on other psychological concepts also important for pedestrians’ attention and safety – alertness, arousal and anxiety.

Routing choices of walking pedestrians in geometrically complex environments are regulated by the interplay of a multitude of factors such as local crowding, (estimated) time to destination, (perceived) comfort. As individual choices combine, macroscopic traffic flow patterns emerge. Understanding the physical mechanisms yielding macroscopic traffi...

Urban parks and forests are important for wellbeing, but feelings of unsafety limited their usage. Removal of vegetation from hotspots of fear is sometimes recommended as a means of boosting safety. However such actions should be approached with caution. One explanation, based on prospect-refuge theory, is that plants increase perceptions of danger...

Urban parks and forests are important for wellbeing, but feelings of unsafety limited their usage. Removal of vegetation from hotspots of fear is sometimes recommended as a means of boosting safety. However such actions should be approached with caution. One explanation, based on prospect-refuge theory, is that plants increase perceptions of danger...

Social touch is essential to human development and communication. Mediated social touch is suggested as a solution for circumstances where distance prevents skin-to-skin contact. However, past research aimed at demonstrating efficacy of mediated touch in reducing stress and promoting helping have produced mixed findings. These inconsistent findings...

Self-tracking technologies bring a new set of experiences into our lives. Through sensors and ubiquitous measurements of bodily performance, a new form of automation experience shapes our understanding of our body and our behavior. While for many individuals self-tracking has an important role in their daily lives, a theoretical understanding of th...

Background: With the ever-expanding interconnectedness through internet, and especially with the recent development of the Internet of Things (IoT), people are increasingly at risk for cybersecurity breaches that can have far-reaching consequences for one’s personal and professional lives, with psychological and mental health ramifications. Objecti...

Background With the ever-expanding interconnectedness of the internet and especially with the recent development of the Internet of Things, people are increasingly at risk for cybersecurity breaches that can have far-reaching consequences for their personal and professional lives, with psychological and mental health ramifications. Objective We aim...

Mediated Social Touch (MST) promises interpersonal touch over a distance through haptic or tactile displays. Tests of the efficacy of MST often involve attempts to demonstrate that effects of social touch (e.g., on affective responses or helping behavior) can be replicated with MST. Results, however, have been mixed. One possible explanation is tha...

The increasing adoption of IoT devices in households has the potential to make life easier and more convenient, but it also poses a greater challenge to system security since several IoT devices are not yet adequately protected against cybersecurity breaches. Understanding the psychological impact of cybersecurity breaches from the user’s perspecti...

We introduce “Moving Light”: an unprecedented real-life crowd steering experiment that involved about 140.000 participants among the visitors of the Glow 2017 Light Festival (Eindhoven, NL). Moving Light targets one outstanding question of paramount societal and technological importance: “can we seamlessly and systematically influence routing decis...

To date, experiments aimed at demonstrating whether effects of naturalistic social touch can be replicated with Mediated Social Touch (MST) provide mixed findings. A possible explanation could be a lack of realism of current haptic displays in combination with not sufficiently taking contextual factors of social touch into account. Using a qualitat...

The increasing adoption of IoT devices in households has the potential to make life easier and more convenient, but it also poses a greater challenge to system security as many IoT devices are not yet well protected against cybersecurity breaches. Understanding the psychological impact of cybersecurity breaches from the user's perspective is releva...

Anthropomorphism is generally defined as the attribution of human-like characteristics to social robots and other non-human objects. We argue that different researchers have different interpretations of this concept, leading to measuring instruments that focus on different subsets of human-like characteristics. In the current paper, we discuss thes...

Since its establishment in 2009 the Intelligent Lighting Institute of Eindhoven University of Technology has been conducting research with users in living labs. This publication provides an overview of the various Living Light Labs, our achievements and the key learnings we gained over the years. These learnings cover requirements on the technical...

Mediated social touch (MST) provides physical contact over a distance for geographically separated individuals. Despite advances in actuator technologies, it remains difficult to recreate the feel and sensation of natural human touch. Combining touch with morphologically congruent visual feedback may overcome limitations related to the low fidelity...

We introduce "Moving Light": an unprecedented real-life crowd steering experiment that involved about 140.000 participants among the visitors of the Glow 2017 Light Festival (Eindhoven, NL). Moving Light targets one outstanding question of paramount societal and technological importance: "can we seamlessly and systematically influence routing decis...

We introduce "Moving Light": an unprecedented real-life crowd steering experiment that involved about 140.000 participants among the visitors of the Glow 2017 Light Festival (Eindhoven, NL). Moving Light targets one outstanding question of paramount societal and technological importance: "can we seamlessly and systematically influence routing decis...

Internet connection has made life easier and more convenient. It increased availability, sharing and trading of information and products. Apart from benefits, anonymity made new form of crime easier: cyber-crime. Understanding risks and consequences of the cyber-crime from the user’s perspective is neglected in the literature, but is very much need...

Aggression is strongly influenced by the surrounding socio-physical context, and the development of aggressive behavior is best understood through a continuous cycle of ongoing person-environment interactions. Empirical studies, nevertheless, have been predominantly conducted in the laboratory, studying aggression as a short-lived phenomenon, emerg...

Contrast analysis is a relatively simple but effective statistical method for testing theoretical predictions about differences between group means against the empirical data. Despite its advantages, contrast analysis is hardly used to date, perhaps because it is not implemented in a convenient manner in many statistical software packages. This tut...

This poster introduces ”Moving Light”, an unprecedented real-life experiment about crowd dynamics and crowd-light interaction. It is deployed along the main route of the Glow Festival 2017 in Eindhoven. About 20.000 visitors per day are exposed to the choice of bypassing an obstacle on the left or on the right side. Can light stimuli sway and bias...

Recognizing people at risk is essential for effective prevention. We developed an instrument that conceptually links engagement in restorative activities with persons’ appreciation for mental vigor. Based on a sample of 322 persons from the general population and a clinical sample of 56 patients diagnosed with burnout, we found that the scope of a...

In two studies, we took a prospect–refuge based perspective to investigate how lighting and other physical attributes (i.e., prospect, concealment, and entrapment) affect people’s judgments of the safety of urban streets during nighttime. Both studies complement existing research, which predominantly use factorial designs, with more ecologically va...

What determines whether people consider an environment to be safe or unsafe? In two studies, we employed a multi-level model to examine how safety-related environmental characteristics and individual characteristics influence people's perception of the safety of night-time urban environments. Both studies support previous findings highlighting a ke...

The natural preference refers to the human tendency to prefer natural substances over their synthetic counterparts, for example in the domains of food and medication. In four studies, we confirm that the natural preference is also operative in the domain of light. Study 1 confirmed that natural has a consistent meaning when people apply it to light...

A brief touch to the shoulder or upper arm increases people’s helping behavior and willingness to comply with requests. In this manuscript, we investigate whether this well-known Midas touch effect is also operative in mediated interactions where the touch act is replaced by electromechanical stimulation through a tactile display. With two experime...

In the Netherlands, there is currently both a quantitative and a qualitative shortage in student housing. New housing units need to be built to accommodate the growing population of students, and existing ones need to be adapted to better fit the students’ needs. However, whilst housing preferences are studied extensively in the literature, less re...

Researchers are beginning to explore the consequences of interacting with virtual worlds using non-human bodies. As virtual environments become more advanced, it is possible for participants to interact with their environments in increasingly sophisticated ways. Using trackers, users can control multiple avatar limbs in order to manipulate objects,...

Can we assess individual differences in the extent to which a person perceives the rubber-hand illusion on the basis of self-reported experiences? In this research, we develop such an instrument using Rasch-type models. In our conception, incorporating an object (e.g., a rubber hand) into one's body image requires various sensorimotor and cognitive...

What explains the experience of ''being there'' in a simulated or mediated environment? In recent years, research has pointed to various technological and psychological factors deemed important in eliciting this so-called experience of telepresence, including interactivity, sensory-motor integration, media trans-parency, and distal attribution. How...

Combining mediated social touch (i.e., interpersonal touch over a distance by means of a tactile display) with vision allows people to both see and feel their remote interaction partner's touches. This is expected to increase the user's sense of telepresence (i.e., the experience of "being there" in the same environment as one's remote interaction...

A brief touch on the upper arm increases people's altruistic behavior and willingness to comply with a request. In this paper, we investigate whether this Midas touch phenomenon would also occur under mediated conditions (i.e., touching via an arm strap equipped with electromechanical actuators). Helping behavior was more frequently endorsed in the...

In the rubber-hand illusion (RHI), people attribute an artificial object to their own body. In the present study, we investigate the extent to which RHI is affected by visual discrepancies between the artificial object and a human hand. We tested Armel and Ramachandran's (2003) hypothesis that people will experience a stronger RHI when the artifici...

We tend to think of our body image as fixed. However, human brains appear to support highly negotiable body images. As a result, our brains show a remarkable flexibility in incorporating non-biological elements (tools and technologies) into the body image, provided reliable, real-time intersensory correlations can be established, and artifacts can...

with their avatars (and thereby enhance immersion?). Physical identifying with one's avatar may enhance the sense of actually 'being there'. This notion may not even be that futuristic. Research has indicated that the brain's repre sentation of the physical body is flexible and can be modified by information provided by the senses (more on this res...

In the efficiency paradox, which was introduced by Hand (1994; J R Stat Soc A, 157, 317-356), two groups of engineers are in disagreement about the average fuel efficiency of a set of cars. One group measured efficiency on a miles per gallon scale, the other on a gallons per mile scale. In the present paper, I argue against an operationalistic expl...

In this paper, we investigate whether the gender differences generally found in same and opposite sex social touch are also present in mediated situations. Participants were led to believe that a male or female stranger was remotely touching them by means of a vest equipped with vibrotactile actuators. Affective responses varied with the stimulated...

In this paper, we develop two behavior-based privacy-need measures for office environments. These two new scales are designed as objective measures, since they even try to avoid introspection. One scale assesses people's motivation to withdraw from social interaction (i.e., the Need-For-Privacy) and the other the motivation to seek social exchange...

Anthropomorphically-designed teleoperation systems may result in the phenomenon of telepresence: The experience of being there at the remote site. Yet, there is another aspect to the phenomenon of telepresence, which has received relatively little attention: Self-identification with the slave robot. In this paper, we aim to further explicate the re...

This paper presents a first study in which a recently reported intermodal perceptual illusion known as the rubber hand illusion is experimentally investigated under mediated conditions. When one’s own hand is placed out of view and a visible fake hand is repeatedly stroked and tapped in synchrony with the unseen hand, subjects report a strong sense...

In this paper, we review research and applications in the area of mediated or remote social touch. Whereas current communication media rely predominately on vision and hearing, mediated social touch allows people to touch each other over a distance by means of haptic feedback technology. Overall, the reviewed applications have interesting potential...

Combining mediated social touch (interpersonal touch over a distance) with visual feedback allows people to both see and feel their interaction partner's touches. Combining touch with vision is expected to increase the transparency of the interface, as well as the user's sense of telepresence. We anticipated these positive effects of visual feedbac...

In this paper, we have investigated the extent to which the rubber hand illusion is affected by visual discrepancies between the artificial rubber hand and a real hand. In contrast to earlier studies, we have explored the effects of shape and texture independently, by systematically manipulating these qualities of the artificial object. Opposite to...