arXiv subjects

Mauricio Sousa

Publications and source records attributed to Mauricio Sousa.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

ITO: Real-time Browser Tab Orchestration Through Intent Detection

People routinely interleave activities while browsing the web, often simultaneously and with overlapping boundaries. Yet organizational primitives in modern browsers treat every tab uniformly, offering no structural awareness of which items serve which purpose. While task-based organization approaches exist, they typically require users to manually organize or invoke reorganization features, and quickly fall out of sync as user intents evolve. To address this, we present Ito, a mixed-initiative approach that infers user intent in real time and organizes browsing activities into dynamic collections called Flows. Ito continuously reads unfolding user context, determines moment-to-moment focus, and creates, restructures, hibernates, and awakens Flows in real time while preserving user control through a mixed-initiative loop of proposals and corrections. In a controlled lab study (N=12) and a two-week field study (N=11), results suggest that Ito's intent-driven Flows aligned more closely with participants' mental models, facilitated task switching and navigation more effectively, and reduced management burden without loss of perceived control.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

Adaptique: Multi-objective and Context-aware Online Adaptation of Selection Techniques in Virtual Reality

Selection is a fundamental task that is challenging in virtual reality due to issues such as distant and small targets, occlusion, and target-dense environments. Previous research has tackled these challenges through various selection techniques, but complicates selection and can be seen as tedious outside of their designed use case. We present Adaptique, an adaptive model that infers and switches to the most optimal selection technique based on user and environmental information. Adaptique considers contextual information such as target size, distance, occlusion, and user posture combined with four objectives: speed, accuracy, comfort, and familiarity which are based on fundamental predictive models of human movement for technique selection. This enables Adaptique to select simple techniques when they are sufficiently efficient and more advanced techniques when necessary. We show that Adaptique is more preferred and performant than single techniques in a user study, and demonstrate Adaptique's versatility in an application.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

VibraForge: A Scalable Prototyping Toolkit For Creating Spatialized Vibrotactile Feedback Systems

Spatialized vibrotactile feedback systems deliver tactile information by placing multiple vibrotactile actuators on the body. As increasing numbers of actuators are required to adequately convey information in complicated applications, haptic designers find it difficult to create such systems due to limited scalability of existing toolkits. We propose VibraForge, an open-source vibrotactile toolkit that supports up to 128 vibrotactile actuators. Each actuator is encapsulated within a self-contained vibration unit and driven by its own microcontroller. By leveraging a chain-connection method, each unit receives independent vibration commands from a control unit, with fine-grained control over intensity and frequency. We also designed a GUI Editor to expedite the authoring of spatial vibrotactile patterns. Technical evaluation showed that vibration units reliably reproduced audio waveforms with low-latency and high-bandwidth data communication. Case studies of a phonemic tactile display, virtual reality fitness training, and drone teleoperation demonstrated the potential usage of VibraForge within different domains. A usability study with non-expert users highlighted the low technical barrier and customizability of the toolkit.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2023

SynthScribe: Deep Multimodal Tools for Synthesizer Sound Retrieval and Exploration

Synthesizers are powerful tools that allow musicians to create dynamic and original sounds. Existing commercial interfaces for synthesizers typically require musicians to interact with complex low-level parameters or to manage large libraries of premade sounds. To address these challenges, we implement SynthScribe -- a fullstack system that uses multimodal deep learning to let users express their intentions at a much higher level. We implement features which address a number of difficulties, namely 1) searching through existing sounds, 2) creating completely new sounds, 3) making meaningful modifications to a given sound. This is achieved with three main features: a multimodal search engine for a large library of synthesizer sounds; a user centered genetic algorithm by which completely new sounds can be created and selected given the users preferences; a sound editing support feature which highlights and gives examples for key control parameters with respect to a text or audio based query. The results of our user studies show SynthScribe is capable of reliably retrieving and modifying sounds while also affording the ability to create completely new sounds that expand a musicians creative horizon.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2023

Promptify: Text-to-Image Generation through Interactive Prompt Exploration with Large Language Models

Text-to-image generative models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generating high-quality images based on textual prompts. However, crafting prompts that accurately capture the user's creative intent remains challenging. It often involves laborious trial-and-error procedures to ensure that the model interprets the prompts in alignment with the user's intention. To address the challenges, we present Promptify, an interactive system that supports prompt exploration and refinement for text-to-image generative models. Promptify utilizes a suggestion engine powered by large language models to help users quickly explore and craft diverse prompts. Our interface allows users to organize the generated images flexibly, and based on their preferences, Promptify suggests potential changes to the original prompt. This feedback loop enables users to iteratively refine their prompts and enhance desired features while avoiding unwanted ones. Our user study shows that Promptify effectively facilitates the text-to-image workflow and outperforms an existing baseline tool widely used for text-to-image generation.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2023

Stargazer: An Interactive Camera Robot for Capturing How-To Videos Based on Subtle Instructor Cues

Live and pre-recorded video tutorials are an effective means for teaching physical skills such as cooking or prototyping electronics. A dedicated cameraperson following an instructor's activities can improve production quality. However, instructors who do not have access to a cameraperson's help often have to work within the constraints of static cameras. We present Stargazer, a novel approach for assisting with tutorial content creation with a camera robot that autonomously tracks regions of interest based on instructor actions to capture dynamic shots. Instructors can adjust the camera behaviors of Stargazer with subtle cues, including gestures and speech, allowing them to fluidly integrate camera control commands into instructional activities. Our user study with six instructors, each teaching a distinct skill, showed that participants could create dynamic tutorial videos with a diverse range of subjects, camera framing, and camera angle combinations using Stargazer.

cs.HC↗