Stephen Anthony Brewster

University of Glasgow | UofG · School of Computing Science

This paper presents the first in-car VR motion sickness (VRMS) detection model based on lower face action units (LF-AUs). Initially developed in a simulated in-car environment with 78 participants, the model’s generalizability was later tested in realworld driving conditions. Motion sickness was induced using visual linear motion in the VR headset...

To the best of our knowledge, this article presents the first experiments on speech-based Automatic Personality Perception performed in a virtual immersive audio environment. The key-difference compared to all previous works in the literature is that, in a virtual immersive environment, people perceive not only the voice of the speakers, but also t...

Physical interactions with socially assistive robots (SARs) positively affect user wellbeing. However, haptic experiences when touching a SAR are typically limited to perceiving the robot's movements or shell texture, while other modalities that could enhance the touch experience with the robot, such as vibrotactile stimulation, are under-explored....

It is challenging for older drivers to transition to manual control after a Take-Over Request (TOR) has been issued by a Level 3 car. This study investigated if the presentation source of the TOR affects driver performance when resuming control. We measured take-over performance, hazard perception, and user acceptance when the TOR was presented on...

Cybersickness remains a major drawback of Virtual Reality (VR) headsets, as a breadth of stationary experiences with visual self-motion can result in visually-induced motion sickness. However, not everybody experiences the same intensity or type of adverse symptoms. Here we propose that prior experience with virtual environments can predict ones de...

Physical interactions with socially assistive robots (SARs) positively affect user wellbeing. However, haptic experiences when touching a SAR are typically limited to perceiving the robot's movements or shell texture, while other modalities that could enhance the touch experience with the robot, such as vibrotactile stimulation, are under-explored....

Semi-autonomous vehicles allowdrivers to engage with non-driving related tasks (NDRTs). However, these tasks interfere with the driver’s situational awareness, key when they need to safely retake control of the vehicle. This paper investigates if Augmented Reality (AR) could be used to present NDRTs to reduce their impact on situational awareness....

Social anxiety is a prevalent mental health concern that impacts quality of life and makes social spaces less accessible. We conducted two studies with socially anxious participants, investigating using affective haptic comfort objects to provide calming support during social exposure. Participatory prototyping informed the design and use of the in...

Objective Mobile phone reminding apps can be used by people with acquired brain injury (ABI) to compensate for their memory impairments. However off-the-shelf apps may be difficult to use. ApplTree has been developed to be accessible to this group, compared to off-the-shelf reminding apps such as Google Calendar. This pilot feasibility trial aimed...

Monitoring in-car VR motion sickness (VRMS) by neurophysiological signals is a formidable challenge due to unavoidable motion artifacts caused by the moving vehicle and necessary physical movements by the user to interact with the VR environment. Therefore, this paper for the first time investigates if resting-state neurophysiological features and...

Immersive technologies allow us to control and customise how we experience reality, but are not widely used in transit due to safety, social acceptability, and comfort barriers. We propose that cues from reality can create reference points in virtuality, which we call Reality Anchors, will reduce these barriers. We used simulated public transportat...

Mobile phone reminding apps can be used by people with acquired brain injury (ABI) to compensate for memory impairments. This pilot feasibility trial aimed to establish the feasibility of a randomized controlled trial comparing reminder apps in an ABI community treatment setting. Adults with ABI and memory difficulty who completed the three-week ba...

Standalone Virtual Reality (VR) headsets can be used when travelling in cars, trains and planes. However, the constrained spaces around transport seating can leave users with little physical space in which to interact using their hands or controllers, and can increase the risk of invading other passengers' personal space or hitting nearby objects...

Cyclists encounter drivers in many traffic scenarios; good communication is key to avoiding collisions. Little is known about everyday driver-cyclist interaction and communication. This is important in designing Automated Vehicles (AVs) that must drive safely around cyclists. We explored driver-cyclist interaction across diverse scenarios through i...

VR (Virtual Reality) Motion Sickness (VRMS) refers to purely visually-induced motion sickness. Not everyone is susceptible to VRMS, but if experienced, nausea will often lead users to withdraw from the ongoing VR applications. VRMS represents a serious challenge in the field of VR ergonomics and human factors. Like other neuro-ergonomics researcher...

This paper investigates how presenting emotionally resonant vibrotactile stimuli at cool, neutral and warm temperature levels impacts mean ratings for emotional resonance and affective response. Affective vibrotactile stimuli can elicit pleasant or calming responses, making them applicable for emotion regulation. Evoking real-world sensations via e...

Unconventional displays, such as 3D displays, projection screens formed of flowing light-scattering particles (fogscreens), and virtual reality (VR) headsets, can create illusions of images floating in mid-air. Paired with hand tracking, gestural interaction with floating user interfaces (UI) is possible on this permeable imagery, thus creating rea...

Passengers spend considerable periods of time in shared transit spaces, relying on smartphones and laptops for work. However, these displays are limited in size and ergonomics compared to typical multi-monitor setups used in the office, impairing productivity. Augmented Reality (AR) headsets could provide large, flexible virtual workspaces during t...

To make the rise of automated vehicles possible and to allow for their mass adoption, one major problem still needs to be solved: Motion sickness. Automated vehicles lead to increased motion sickness partly caused by an occlusion of the outside world (conflict between visual and vestibular system). In this study, we propose the usage of Virtual Rea...

This article discusses the Keyboard Augmentation Toolkit (KAT), which supports the creation of virtual keyboards that can be used both for standalone input (e.g., for mid-air text entry) and to augment physically tracked keyboards/surfaces in mixed reality. In a user study, we firstly examine the impact and pitfalls of visualising shortcuts on a tr...

Electrotactile stimulation is a novel form of haptic feedback. There is little work investigating its basic design parameters and how they create effective tactile cues. This paper describes two experiments that extend our knowledge of two key parameters. The first investigated the combination of pulse width and amplitude (Intensity) on sensations...

People with memory impairments following an acquired brain injury stand to benefit from smartphone apps as memory aids. Due, in part, to usability issues they use smartphone-based reminding less than the general population. Evidence suggests this group may benefit from user interface (UI) designs with more screens with less information per screen (...

[https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6373681] These are the datasets about the experimental group (N=20, where N is the sample size, that is, 20 participants in total) and control group (N=20, where N is the sample size, that is, 20 participants in total) for our published paper entitled "Multimodal Biosensing for Vestibular Network-Based Cybersickness...

Mixed Reality (MR) headsets enable the rendering of virtual content selectively intermixed with reality. These headsets have the capacity to allow passengers to break free from the restraints of physical displays placed in constrained environments such as cars, trains and planes. Moreover, they have the potential to allow passengers to make better...

Virtual reality (VR) has the potential to induce cybersickness (CS), which impedes CS-susceptible VR users from the benefit of emerging VR applications. To better detect CS, the current study investigated whether/how the newly proposed human vestibular network (HVN) is involved in flagship consumer VR-induced CS by simultaneously recording autonomi...

How the performance of autonomic physiological, and human vestibular network (HVN)-based brain functional connectivity (BFC) features differ in a VR sickness classification task is underexplored. Therefore, this paper presents an AI-aided comparative study of the two. Results from different AI models all show that autonomic physiological features r...

This paper presents a survey informing a user-first approach todesigning calming affective haptic stimuli by eliciting user prefer-ences in different social scenarios. Prior affective haptics researchpresented users with stimuli and recorded emotional responses. Bycontrast this work focuses on the sensations users wish to expe-rience and how these...

Significance: The rise of consumer-friendly virtual reality (VR) systems has led to related research to develop and deliver gamified cognitive and rehabilitation therapies in VR. However, some participants withdraw from the therapy due to VR-induced motion sickness (cybersickness). Moreover, approximately 60% of the general population experience so...

Background Attachment research has been limited by the lack of quick and easy measures. We report development and validation of the School Attachment Monitor (SAM), a novel measure for largescale assessment of attachment in children aged 5–9, in the general population. SAM offers automatic presentation, on computer, of story-stems based on the Manc...

Segmenting audio into homogeneous sections such as music and speech helps us understand the content of audio. It is useful as a pre-processing step to index, store, and modify audio recordings, radio broadcasts and TV programmes. Deep learning models for segmentation are generally trained on copyrighted material, which cannot be shared. Annotating...

This paper examines key challenges in supporting passenger use of augmented and virtual reality headsets in transit. These headsets will allow passengers to break free from the restraints of physical displays placed in constrained environments such as cars, trains and planes. Moreover, they have the potential to allow passengers to make better use...

This paper describes a novel category of affective vibrotactile stimuli which evoke real-world sensations and details a study into emotional responses to them. The affective properties of short and abstract vibrotactile waveforms have previously been studied and shown to have a narrow emotional range. By contrast this paper investigated emotional r...

Background Attachment research has been limited by the lack of quick and easy measures. We report development and validation of the School Attachment Monitor (SAM), a novel measure for largescale assessment of attachment in children aged 5-9, in the general population. SAM offers automatic presentation, on computer, of story-stems based on the Manc...

With the development of consumer virtual reality (VR), people have increasing opportunities to experience cybersickness (CS)-a kind of visually-induced motion sickness (MS). In view of the importance of CS mitigation (CSM), this paper reviews the methods of electrostimulation-based CSM (e-CSM), broadly categorised as either "VR-centric" or "Human-c...

Many head-mounted virtual reality display (VR-HMD) applications that involve moving visual environments (e.g., virtual rollercoaster, car and airplane driving) will trigger cybersickness (CS). Previous research Arshad et al. (2015) has explored the inhibitory effect of cathodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on vestibular cortical e...

The gradual implementation of automated driving systems opens a wide range of opportunities for researchers and vehicle designers to transform vehicle interiors into a place for productivity and well-being. Former events held by the organizers have identified a research agenda to transform vehicles into a space for office work. This second edition...

Ultrasonic tactile stimulation can give the user contactless tactile feedback in a variety of human-computer interfaces. Parameters, such as duration, rhythm, and intensity, can be used to encode information into tactile sensation. The present aim was to investigate the differentiation of six ultrasonic tactile stimulations that were varied by form...

Ultrasound haptics is a contactless haptic technology that enables novel mid-air interactions with rich multisensory feedback. This paper surveys recent advances in ultrasound haptic technology. We discuss the fundamentals of this haptic technology, how a variety of perceptible sensations are rendered, and how it is currently being used to enable n...

Background Smartphone reminding applications can help overcome memory difficulties experienced by people with acquired brain injury (ABI). Cognitive difficulties with memory and attention make entering reminders into a device, and remembering to set reminders, challenging for this group. ApplTree is a reminding app with features that aim to address...

Mixed Reality (MR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) headsets can improve upon existing physical multi-display environments by rendering large, ergonomic virtual display spaces whenever and wherever they are needed. However, given the physical and ergonomic limitations of neck movement, users may need assistance to view these display...

Levitating particle displays are an emerging technology where content is composed of physical pixels. Unlike digital displays, manipulating the content is not straightforward because physical constraints affect the placement and movement of each particle: dragging a particle may cause it to collide with others along its movement path. We describe i...

Electrotactile feedback can be used as a novel method to evoke different sensations on the skin. However, there is a lack of research exploring electrotactile feedback on the palm. This paper presents two experiments that investigate the effects of manipulating pulse width, amplitude and frequency of electrical stimulation on perceived sensations (...

Child cyclists are at greater risk for car-to-cyclist accidents than adults. This is in part due to developmental differences in the motor and perceptual-motor abilities of children and adults, and missing cycling infrastructure. To address these issues, we examine unimodal and projection-based techniques to support children in maintaining a good l...