arXiv subjects

Hailong Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Hailong Liu.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Is Silent eHMI Enough? A Passenger-Centric Study on Effective eHMI for Autonomous Personal Mobility Vehicles in the Field

Autonomous Personal Mobility Vehicle (APMV) is a miniaturized autonomous vehicle designed to provide short-distance mobility to everyone in pedestrian-rich environments. By the characteristic of the open design, passengers on the APMV are exposed to the communication between the eHMI deployed on APMVs and pedestrians. Therefore, to ensure an optimal passenger experience, eHMI designs for APMVs must consider the potential impact of APMV-pedestrian communications on passengers' subjective feelings. To this end, this study discussed three external human-machine interface (eHMI) designs, i.e., 1) graphical user interface (GUI)-based eHMI with text message (eHMI-T), 2) multimodal user interface (MUI)-based eHMI with neutral voice (eHMI-NV), and 3) MUI-based eHMI with affective voice (eHMI-AV), from the perspective of APMV passengers in the communication between APMV and pedestrians. In the riding field experiment (N=24), we found that eHMI-T may be less suitable for APMVs. This conclusion was drawn based on passengers' feedback, as they expressed an awkward feeling during the "silent time" when the eHMI-T provided information only to pedestrians but not to passengers. Additionally, these two MUI-based eHMIs with voice cues had their own advantages, i.e., eHMI-NV has an advantage in pragmatic quality, while eHMI-AV has an advantage in hedonic quality. The study also highlights the necessity of considering passengers' personalities when desig

cs.HC↗

arXiv2023

GaVe: A Webcam-Based Gaze Vending Interface Using One-Point Calibration

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, beneficial use cases for hygienic, touchless human-machine interaction have been explored. Gaze input, i.e., information input via eye-movements of users, represents a promising method for contact-free interaction in human-machine systems. In this paper, we present the GazeVending interface (GaVe), which lets users control actions on a display with their eyes. The interface works on a regular webcam, available on most of today's laptops, and only requires a one-point calibration before use. GaVe is designed in a hierarchical structure, presenting broad item cluster to users first and subsequently guiding them through another selection round, which allows the presentation of a large number of items. Cluster/item selection in GaVe is based on the dwell time of fixations, i.e., the time duration that users look at a given Cluster/item. A user study (N=22) was conducted to test optimal dwell time thresholds and comfortable human-to-display distances. Users' perception of the system, as well as error rates and task completion time were registered. We found that all participants were able to use the system with a short time training, and showed good performance during system usage, selecting a target item within a group of 12 items in 6.76 seconds on average. Participants were able to quickly understand and know how to interact with the interface. We provide design guidelines for GaVe and discuss the potentials of the system.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2023

Generating Visual Information for Motion Sickness Reduction Using a Computational Model Based on SVC Theory

With the advancements in automated driving, there is concern that motion sickness will increase as non-driving-related tasks increase. Therefore, techniques to reduce motion sickness have drawn much attention. Research studies have attempted to estimate motion sickness using computational models for controlling it. Among them, a computational model for estimating motion sickness incidence (MSI) with visual information as input based on subjective vertical conflict theories was developed. In addition, some studies attempt to mitigate motion sickness by controlling visual information. In particular, it has been confirmed that motion sickness is suppressed by matching head movement and visual information. However, there has been no research on optimal visual information control that suppresses motion sickness in vehicles by utilizing mathematical models. We, therefore, propose a method for generating optimal visual information to suppress motion sickness caused from vehicle motion by utilizing a motion sickness model with vestibular and visual inputs. To confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method, we investigated changes in the motion sickness experienced by the participants according to the visual information displayed on the head-mounted display. The experimental results suggested that the proposed method mitigates the motion sickness of the participants.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2023

Subjective Vertical Conflict Model with Visual Vertical: Predicting Motion Sickness on Autonomous Personal Mobility Vehicles

Passengers of level 3-5 autonomous personal mobility vehicles (APMV) can perform non-driving tasks, such as reading books and smartphones, while driving. It has been pointed out that such activities may increase motion sickness, especially when frequently avoiding pedestrians or obstacles in shared spaces. Many studies have been conducted to build countermeasures, of which various computational motion sickness models have been developed. Among them, models based on subjective vertical conflict (SVC) theory, which describes vertical changes in direction sensed by human sensory organs v.s. those expected by the central nervous system, have been actively developed. However, no current computational model can integrate visual vertical information with vestibular sensations. We proposed a 6 DoF SVC-VV model which added a visually perceived vertical block into a conventional 6 DoF SVC model to predict visual vertical directions from image data simulating the visual input of a human. In a driving experiment, 27 participants experienced an APMV with two visual conditions: looking ahead (LAD) and working with a tablet device (WAD). We verified that passengers got motion sickness while riding the APMV, and the symptom were severer when especially working on it, by simulating the frequent pedestrian avoidance scenarios of the APMV in the experiment. In addition, the results of the experiment demonstrated that the proposed 6 DoF SVC-VV model could describe the increased motion sickness experienced when the visual vertical and gravitational acceleration directions were different.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2023

Generation of highly retrievable atom photon entanglement with a millisecond lifetime via a spatially multiplexed cavity

Qubit memory that is entangled with photonic qubit is the building block for long distance quantum repeaters. Cavity enhanced and long lived spin wave photon entanglement has been demonstrated by applying dual laser beams onto optical-lattice atoms. However, owing to cross readouts by two beams, retrieval efficiency of spin wave qubit is decreased by one quarter compared to that of single mode spin wave at all storage times. Here, by coupling cold atoms to two modes of a polarization interferometer based cavity, we achieve perfect qubit retrieval in cavity enhanced and long lived atom photon entanglement. A write laser beam is applied onto cold atoms, we then create a magnetic field insensitive spin wave qubit that is entangled with the photonic qubit encoded onto two arms of the interferometer. The spin wave qubit is retrieved by a read beam, which avoids the cross readouts. Our experiment demonstrates 540μs storage time at 50% intrinsic qubit retrieval efficiency, which is 13.5 times longer than the best reported result.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

Full Geometric Control of Hidden Color Information in Diffraction Gratings under Angled White Light Illumination

Under white light illumination, gratings produce an angular distribution of wavelengths dependent on the diffraction order and geometric parameters. However, previous studies of gratings are limited to at least one geometric parameter (height, periodicity, orientation, angle of incidence) kept constant. Here, we vary all geometric parameters in the gratings using a versatile nanofabrication technique, two-photon polymerization lithography, to encode hidden color information through 2 design approaches. The first approach hides color information by decoupling the effects of grating height and periodicity under normal and oblique incidence. The second approach hides multiple sets of color information by arranging gratings in sectors around semi-circular pixels. Different images are revealed with negligible crosstalk under oblique incidence and varying sample rotation angles. Our analysis shows that an angular separation >= 10° between adjacent sectors is required to suppress crosstalk. This work has potential applications in information storage and security watermarks.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2022

Colorful Optical Vortices with White Light Illumination

The orbital angular momentum (OAM) of light holds great promise for applications in optical communication, super-resolution imaging, and high-dimensional quantum computing. However, the spatio-temporal coherence of the light source has been essential for generating OAM beams, as incoherent ambient light would result in polychromatic and obscured OAM beams in the visible spectrum. Here, we extend the applications of OAM to ambient lighting conditions. By miniaturizing spiral phase plates and integrating them with structural color filters, we achieve spatio-temporal coherence using only an incoherent white light source. These optical elements act as building blocks that encode both color and OAM information in the form of colorful optical vortices. Thus, pairs of transparent substrates that contain matching positions of these vortices constitute a reciprocal optical lock and key system. Due to the multiple helical eigenstates of OAM, the pairwise coupling can be further extended to form a one-to-many matching and validation scheme. Generating and decoding colorful optical vortices with broadband white light could find potential applications in anti-counterfeiting, optical metrology, high-capacity optical encryption, and on-chip 3D photonic devices.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2022

Motion Sickness Modeling with Visual Vertical Estimation and Its Application to Autonomous Personal Mobility Vehicles

Passengers (drivers) of level 3-5 autonomous personal mobility vehicles (APMV) and cars can perform non-driving tasks, such as reading books and smartphones, while driving. It has been pointed out that such activities may increase motion sickness. Many studies have been conducted to build countermeasures, of which various computational motion sickness models have been developed. Many of these are based on subjective vertical conflict (SVC) theory, which describes vertical changes in direction sensed by human sensory organs vs. those expected by the central nervous system. Such models are expected to be applied to autonomous driving scenarios. However, no current computational model can integrate visual vertical information with vestibular sensations. We proposed a 6 DoF SVC-VV model which add a visually perceived vertical block into a conventional six-degrees-of-freedom SVC model to predict VV directions from image data simulating the visual input of a human. Hence, a simple image-based VV estimation method is proposed. As the validation of the proposed model, this paper focuses on describing the fact that the motion sickness increases as a passenger reads a book while using an AMPV, assuming that visual vertical (VV) plays an important role. In the static experiment, it is demonstrated that the estimated VV by the proposed method accurately described the gravitational acceleration direction with a low mean absolute deviation. In addition, the results of the driving experiment using an APMV demonstrated that the proposed 6 DoF SVC-VV model could describe that the increased motion sickness experienced when the VV and gravitational acceleration directions were different.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2022

Cooperative Path-following Control of Remotely Operated Underwater Robots for Human Visual Inspection Task

Remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) have drawn much attention to underwater tasks, such as the inspection and maintenance of infrastructure. The workload of ROV operators tends to be high, even for the skilled ones. Therefore, assistance methods for the operators are desired. This study focuses on a task in which a human operator controls an underwater robot to follow a certain path while visually inspecting objects in the vicinity of the path. In such a task, it is desirable to realize the speed of trajectory control manually because the visual inspection is performed by a human operator. However, to allocate resources to visual inspection, it is desirable to minimize the workload on the path-following by assisting with the automatic control. Therefore, the objective of this study was to develop a cooperative path-following control method that achieves the above-mentioned task by expanding a robust path-following control law of nonholonomic wheeled vehicles. To simplify this problem, we considered a path-following and visual objects recognition task in a two-dimensional plane. We conducted an experiment with participants (n=16) who completed the task using the proposed method and manual control. The results showed that both the path-following errors and the workload of the participants were significantly smaller with the proposed method than with manual control. In addition, subjective responses demonstrated that operator attention tended to be allocated to objects recognition rather than robot operation tasks with the proposed method. These results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed cooperative path-following control method.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2022

Overcoming Van der Waals Forces in reconfigurable nanostructures

Reconfigurable metamaterials require constituent nanostructures to demonstrate switching of shapes with external stimuli. For generality, such nanostructures would touch and stick to other surfaces in one of its configurations. Yet, a longstanding challenge is in overcoming this stiction caused by Van der Waals forces, which impedes shape recovery. Here, we introduce a stiff yet self-recovering material system based on acrylic acid, and tested it in high-aspect ratio structures, where recovery is weak. This designer material has a storage modulus of ~5.2 GPa at room temperature and ~90 MPa in the rubbery state at 150 Celsius, an order of magnitude higher than previous reports. A high-resolution resin for two-photon lithography was developed based on this polymer system, enabling 3D printing of nanopillars with diameters of ~400 nm and aspect ratio as high as ~10. Experimentally, we observed self-recovery as collapsed and touching structures overcome stiction to stand back up. We developed a theoretical model to explain the recoverability of these sub-micron structures. Reconfigurable structural colour prints and holograms were demonstrated, indicating potential applications of the material system as a shape memory polymer suitable for sub-micron reconfigurable metamaterials.

physics.app-ph↗

arXiv2022

Reconfiguring colours of single relief structures by directional stretching

Colour changes can be achieved by straining photonic crystals or gratings embedded in stretchable materials. However, the multiple repeat units and the need for a volumetric assembly of nanostructures limit the density of information content. Inspired by surface reliefs on oracle bones and music records as means of information archival, here we endow surface-relief elastomers with multiple sets of information that are accessible by mechanical straining along in-plane axes. Distinct from Bragg diffraction effects from periodic structures, we report trenches that generate colour due to variations in trench depth, enabling individual trench segments to support a single colour. Using 3D printed cuboids, we replicated trenches of varying geometric parameters in elastomers. These parameters determine the initial colour (or lack thereof), the response to capillary forces, and the appearance when strained along or across the trenches. Strain induces modulation in trench depth or the opening and closure of a trench, resulting in surface reliefs with up to six distinct states, and an initially featureless surface that reveals two distinct images when stretched along different axes. The highly reversible structural colours are promising in optical data archival, anti-counterfeiting, and strain-sensing applications.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2022

High-order Photonic Cavity Modes Enabled 3D Structural Color

It remains a challenge to directly print three-dimensional arbitrary shapes that exhibit structural colors at the micrometer scale. Woodpile photonic crystals (WPCs) fabricated via two-photon lithography (TPL) are promising as building blocks to produce 3D geometries that generate structural colors due to their ability to exhibit either omnidirectional or anisotropic photonic stopbands. However, existing approaches have focused on achieving structural colors when illuminating WPCs from the top, which necessitates print resolutions beyond the limit of commercial TPL and/or post-processing techniques. Here, we devised a new strategy to support high-order photonic cavity modes upon side-illumination on WPCs that surprisingly generate large reflectance peaks in the visible spectrum. Based on that, we demonstrate one-step printing of 3D photonic structural colors without requiring post-processing or subwavelength features. Vivid colors with reflectance peaks exhibiting a full width at half maximum of ~25 nm, a maximum reflectance of 50%, gamut of ~85% of sRGB, and large viewing angles, were achieved. In addition, we also demonstrated voxel-level manipulation and control of colors in arbitrary-shaped 3D objects constituted with WPCs as unit cells, which has great potential for applications in dynamic color displays, colorimetric sensing, anti-counterfeiting, and light-matter interaction platforms.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2022

Recent Advances in Tunable Metasurfaces: Materials, Design and Applications

Metasurfaces, a two-dimensional (2D) form of metamaterials constituted by planar meta-atoms, exhibit exotic abilities to freely tailor electromagnetic (EM) waves. Over the past decade, tunable metasurfaces have come to the frontier in the field of nanophotonics, with tremendous effort focused on developing and integrating various active materials into metasurfaces. As a result, tunable/reconfigurable metasurfaces with multi-functionalities triggered by various external stimuli have been successfully demonstrated, openings a new avenue to dynamically manipulate and control EM waves for photonic applications in demand. In this review, we first brief the progress of tunable metasurfaces development in the last decade and highlight representative works from the perspectives of active materials development, design methodologies and application-driven exploration. Then, we elaborate on the active tuning mechanisms and relevant active materials. Next, we discuss recent achievements in theory as well as machine learning (ML) assisted design methodologies to sustain the development of this field. After that, we summarize and describe typical application areas of the tunable metasurfaces. We conclude this review by analyzing existing challenges and presenting our perspectives on future directions and opportunities in this vibrant and fast-developing field.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2021

Generation of entanglement between a highly wave-packet-tunable photon and a spin-wave memory in cold atoms

Controls of waveforms (pulse durations) of single photons are important tasks for effectively interconnecting disparate atomic memories in hybrid quantum networks. So far, the waveform control of single photon that is entangled with an atomic memory remains unexplored. Here, we demonstrated control of waveform length of the photon that is entangled with an atomic spin-wave memory by varying light-atom interaction time in cold atoms. The Bell parameter S as a function of the duration of photon pulse is measured, which shows that violations of Bell equality can be achieved for the photon pulse in the duration range from 40 ns to 50 us, where, S=2.64+/-0.02 and S=2.26+/-0.05 for the 40-ns and 50-μs durations, respectively. The measured results show that S parameter decreases with the increase in the pulse duration. We confirm that the increase in photon noise probability per pulse with the pulse-duration is responsible for the S decrease.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2021

Generation of perfect-cavity-enhanced atom-photon entanglement with a millisecond lifetime via a spatially-multiplexed cavity

A qubit memory is the building block for quantum information. Cavity-enhanced spin-wave-photon entanglement has been achieved by applying dual-control modes. However, owing to cross readouts between the modes, the qubit retrieval efficiency is about one quarter lower than that for a single spin-wave mode at all storage times. Here, we overcome cross readouts using a multiplexed ring cavity. The cavity is embedded with a polarization interferometer, and we create a write-out photonic qubit entangled with a magnetic-field-insensitive spin-wave qubit by applying a single-mode write-laser beam to cold atoms. The spin-wave qubit is retrieved with a single-mode read-laser beam, and the quarter retrieval-efficiency loss is avoided at all storage times. Our experiment demonstrates 50% intrinsic retrieval efficiency for 540 microsecond storage time, which is 13.5 times longer than the best reported result. Importantly, our multiplexed-cavity scheme paves one road to generate perfect-cavity-enhanced and large-scale multiplexed spin-wave-photon entanglement with a long lifetime.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2021

Autonomous Vehicles Drive into Shared Spaces: eHMI Design Concept Focusing on Vulnerable Road Users

In comparison to conventional traffic designs, shared spaces promote a more pleasant urban environment with slower motorized movement, smoother traffic, and less congestion. In the foreseeable future, shared spaces will be populated with a mixture of autonomous vehicles (AVs) and vulnerable road users (VRUs) like pedestrians and cyclists. However, a driver-less AV lacks a way to communicate with the VRUs when they have to reach an agreement of a negotiation, which brings new challenges to the safety and smoothness of the traffic. To find a feasible solution to integrating AVs seamlessly into shared-space traffic, we first identified the possible issues that the shared-space designs have not considered for the role of AVs. Then an online questionnaire was used to ask participants about how they would like a driver of the manually driving vehicle to communicate with VRUs in a shared space. We found that when the driver wanted to give some suggestions to the VRUs in a negotiation, participants thought that the communications via the driver's body behaviors were necessary. Besides, when the driver conveyed information about her/his intentions and cautions to the VRUs, participants selected different communication methods with respect to their transport modes (as a driver, pedestrian, or cyclist). These results suggest that novel eHMIs might be useful for AV-VRU communication when the original drivers are not present. Hence, a potential eHMI design concept was proposed for different VRUs to meet their various expectations. In the end, we further discussed the effects of the eHMIs on improving the sociality in shared spaces and the autonomous driving systems.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2021

Optical Rashba effect in a monolithic light-emitting perovskite metasurface

The Rashba effect, i.e., the splitting of electronic spin-polarized bands in the momentum space of a crystal with broken inversion symmetry, has enabled the realization of spin-orbitronic devices, in which spins are manipulated by spin-orbit coupling. In optics, where the helicity of light polarization represents the spin degree of freedom for spin-momentum coupling, the optical Rashba effect is manifested by the splitting of optical states with opposite chirality in the momentum space. Previous realizations of the optical Rashba effect relied on passive devices determining either the propagation direction of surface plasmons or circularly polarized light into nanostructures, or the directional emission of polarized luminescence from metamaterials hybridized with light-emitting media. Here we demonstrate an active device underpinned by the optical Rashba effect, in which a monolithic halide perovskite metasurface emits highly directional chiral photoluminescence. An all-dielectric metasurface design with broken in-plane inversion symmetry is directly embossed into the high refractive index, light-emitting perovskite film, yielding a degree of circular polarization of photoluminescence of 40% at room temperature - more than one order of magnitude greater than in state of art chiral perovskites.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2021

Phase-change perovskite tunable microlaser

Since the invention of the laser, adoption of new gain media and device architectures has provided solutions to a variety of applications requiring specific power, size, spectral, spatial, and temporal tunability. Here we introduce a fundamentally new type of tunable semiconductor laser based on a phase-change perovskite metasurface that acts simultaneously as gain medium and optical cavity. As a proof of principle demonstration, we fabricate a subwavelength-thin perovskite metasurface supporting bound states in the continuum (BICs). Upon the perovskite structural phase transitions, both its refractive index and gain vary substantially, inducing fast (1.35 nm/K rate) and broad spectral tunability (>15 nm in the near-infrared), deterministic spatial mode hopping between polarization vortexes, and hysteretic optical bistability of the microlaser. These features highlight the uniqueness of phase-change perovskite tunable lasers, which may find wide applications in compact and low-cost optical multiplexers, sensors, memories, and LIDARs.

physics.optics↗