arXiv subjects

Yujie Tao

Publications and source records attributed to Yujie Tao.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Audio Personas: Augmenting Social Perception via Body-Anchored Audio Cues

We introduce Audio Personas, enabling users to "decorate" themselves with body-anchored sounds in audio augmented reality. Like outfits, makeup, and fragrances, audio personas offer an alternative yet dynamic channel to augment face-to-face interactions. For instance, one can set their audio persona as rain sounds to reflect a bad mood, bee sounds to establish personal boundaries, or a playful "woosh" sound to mimic passing by someone like a breeze. To instantiate the concept, we implemented a headphone-based prototype with multi-user tracking and audio streaming. Our preregistered in-lab study with 64 participants showed that audio personas influenced how participants formed impressions. Individuals with positive audio personas were rated as more socially attractive, more likable, and less threatening than those with negative audio personas. Our study with audio designers revealed that audio personas were preferred in public and semi-public-private spaces for managing social impressions (e.g., personality) and signaling current states (e.g., emotions).

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

Harms in Repurposing Real-World Sensory Cues for Mixed Reality: A Causal Perspective

The rise of Mixed Reality (MR) stimulates new interactive techniques that seamlessly blend the virtual and physical environments. Just as virtual content could be overlayed onto the physical world for providing adaptive user interfaces [5, 8], emergent techniques "repurpose" everyday environments and sensory cues to support the virtual content [7, 9, 13-15]. For instance, a strong wind gust in the real world, rather than being distracting to the virtual experience, can be mapped with trees swaying in MR to achieve a unifying experience [15], as shown in Figure 1. Such techniques introduce stronger immersion, but they also expose users to overlooked perceptual manipulations, where safety risks arise from misperception of real-world events. In this work, we apply a causal inference perspective to understand the harms of repurposing real-world sensory cues for MR. We argue that by viewing the MR experience as a causal inference process of interpreting cues arising from both the virtual and physical world, MR designers and researchers can gain a new lens to understand potential perceptual manipulation harms.

cs.HC↗