Publications associées à Virtual humans: thirty years of research, what next?

Customizing the human-avatar mapping based on EEG error related potentials during avatar-based interaction

Ronan Boulic, Ricardo Andres Chavarriaga Lozano, Bruno Herbelin, José del Rocio Millán Ruiz, Olaf Blanke, Fumiaki Iwane, Thibault Serge Mario Porssut

Objective. A key challenge of virtual reality (VR) applications is to maintain a reliable human-avatar mapping. Users may lose the sense of controlling (sense of agency), owning (sense of body ownership), or being located (sense of self-location) inside th ...

2024

Seeking the new, learning from the unexpected: Computational models of surprise and novelty in the brain

Alireza Modirshanechi

Human babies have a natural desire to interact with new toys and objects, through which they learn how the world around them works, e.g., that glass shatters when dropped, but a rubber ball does not. When their predictions are proven incorrect, such as whe ...

EPFL2024

An immersive virtual reality tool for assessing left and right unilateral spatial neglect

Olaf Blanke, Andrea Serino, Roberta Ronchi

The reported rate of the occurrence of unilateral spatial neglect (USN) is highly variable likely due to the lack of validity and low sensitivity of classical tools used to assess it. Virtual reality (VR) assessments try to overcome these limitations by pr ...

Wiley2024

Generalization and Personalization of Machine Learning for Multimodal Mobile Sensing in Everyday Life

Lakmal Buddika Meegahapola

A range of behavioral and contextual factors, including eating and drinking behavior, mood, social context, and other daily activities, can significantly impact an individual's quality of life and overall well-being. Therefore, inferring everyday life aspe ...

EPFL2024

Changes in spatial self-consciousness elicit grid cell–like representation in the entorhinal cortex

Olaf Blanke, Hyeongdong Park, Hyukjun Moon, Baptiste Gauthier, Emanuela De Falco, Louis Philippe Albert, Corentin Marie Hervé Robert Tasu

Grid cells in the entorhinal cortex (EC) encode an individual’s location in space, integrating both environmental and multisensory bodily cues. Notably, body-derived signals are also primary signals for the sense of self. While studies have demonstrated th ...

2024

Modulation of Visually Induced Self-motion Illusions by α Transcranial Electric Stimulation over the Superior Parietal Cortex

Sylvain Jean-François Harquel

The growing popularity of virtual reality systems has led to a renewed interest in understanding the neurophysiological correlates of the illusion of self-motion (vection), a phenomenon that can be both intentionally induced or avoided in such systems, dep ...

Mit Press2024

Involvement of prelimbic cortex neurons and related circuits in the acquisition of a cooperative learning by pairs of rats

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Elias Georges Gebara, Ana del Rocio Conde Moro

Social behaviors such as cooperation are crucial for mammals. A deeper knowledge of the neuronal mechanisms underlying cooperation can be beneficial for people suffering from pathologies with impaired social behavior. Our aim was to study the brain activit ...

Springer2024

High-Resolution Modeling Without Computation Slowdown for PETALE in CROCUS

Andreas Pautz, Vincent Pierre Lamirand, Thomas Jean-François Ligonnet, Axel Guy Marie Laureau

In a collaboration between Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and CEA, in the fall of 2020, the experimental Programme d’Étude en Transmission de l’Acier Lourd et ses Eléments (PETALE) was successfully carried out in the CROCUS reactor of EPFL ...

2024

SORI: A softness-rendering interface to unravel the nature of softness perception

Jamie Paik, Mustafa Mete, Hwayeong Jeong

Tactile perception of softness serves a critical role in the survival, well-being, and social interaction among various species, including humans. This perception informs activities from food selection in animals to medical palpation for disease detection ...

National Academy of Sciences2024

From finger animation to full-body embodiment of avatars with different morphologies and proportions

Mathias Guy Delahaye

VR (Virtual Reality) is a real-time simulation that creates the subjective illusion of being in a virtual world. This thesis explores how integrating the user's body and fingers can be achieved and beneficial for the user to experience VR. At the advent of ...

EPFL2023

An immersive virtual reality system for ecological assessment of peripersonal and extrapersonal unilateral spatial neglect

Ravi Tej Sai Giridhar Tadi, Olaf Blanke, Andrea Serino, Roberta Ronchi

BackgroundUnilateral spatial neglect (USN) is a debilitating neuropsychological syndrome that often follows brain injury, in particular a stroke affecting the right hemisphere. In current clinical practice, the assessment of neglect is based on old-fashion ...

BioMed Central2023

Saliency prediction in 360° architectural scenes: Performance and impact of daylight variations

Marilyne Andersen, Sabine Süsstrunk, Kynthia Chamilothori, Bahar Aydemir, Caroline Karmann, Seungryong Kim

Saliency models are image-based prediction models that estimate human visual attention. Such models, when applied to architectural spaces, could pave the way for design decisions where visual attention is taken into account. In this study, we tested the pe ...

2023

Microgravity induces overconfidence in perceptual decision-making

Davide Scaramuzza, Christian Pfeiffer, Leyla Loued-Khenissi

Does gravity affect decision-making? This question comes into sharp focus as plans for interplanetary human space missions solidify. In the framework of Bayesian brain theories, gravity encapsulates a strong prior, anchoring agents to a reference frame via ...

Nature Portfolio2023

Social isolation shortens lifespan through oxidative stress in ants

Alessandro Crespi, Laurent Keller

Social isolation negatively affects health, induces detrimental behaviors, and shortens lifespan in social species. Little is known about the mechanisms underpinning these effects because model species are typically short-lived and non-social. Using coloni ...

Nature Research2023

Human Interactive Robotic Surfaces for Physical Immersion

Fabio Zuliani

Computers have long been augmenting human capabilities and communication, and with emerging technologies, physical immersion in virtual worlds is now attainable. These advancements push the boundaries of human potential, allowing designers, architects, eng ...

EPFL2023

Systematic design of a multi-input multi-output controller by model-based decoupling: a demonstration on TCV using multi-species gas injection

Basil Duval, Christian Gabriel Theiler, Cristian Galperti, Artur Perek

In this paper, we present the first results of a systematically designed multi-input multi-output gas-injection controller on Tokamak a Configuration Variable (TCV). We demonstrate the simultaneous real-time control of the NII emission front position and l ...

IOP Publishing Ltd2023

'connEcted caesarean section': creating a virtual link between MOthers and their infanTs to ImprOve maternal childbirth experieNce - study protocol for a PILOT trial (e-motion-pilot)

Sandra Maria Marcadent, Karine Lepigeon, Fiona Corbaz, David Desseauve

IntroductionOne-third of mothers rate their childbirth as traumatic. The prevalence of childbirth-related post-traumatic stress disorder (CB-PTSD) is 4.7%. Skin-to-skin contact is a protective factor against CB-PTSD. However, during a caesarean section (CS ...

BMJ PUBLISHING GROUP2023

Mitofusin-2 in nucleus accumbens D2-MSNs regulates social dominance and neuronal function

Bernard Schneider, Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Olivia Zanoletti, Jocelin Grosse, Elias Georges Gebara, Marie-Isabelle Guillot de Suduiraut, Simone Astori, Sriparna Ghosal, Eva Ramos Fernandez, Alessandro Chioino

The nucleus accumbens (NAc) is a brain hub regulating motivated behaviors, including social competitiveness. Mitochondrial function in the NAc links anxiety with social competitiveness, and the mitochondrial fusion protein mitofusin 2 (Mfn2) in NAc neurons ...

2023

Human-Robot Swarm Interaction: An Explorative Path to Foster Complex Systems Understanding

Hala Khodr

Order, regularities, and patterns are ubiquitous around us. A flock of birds maneuvering in the sky, the self-organization of social insects, a global pandemic or a traffic jam are examples of complex systems where the macroscopic patterns arise from the m ...

EPFL2023

Effects of Head-Tracking Artefacts on Externalization and Localization in Azimuth With Binaural Wearable Devices

Hervé Lissek, Gilles André Courtois, Vincent Pierre Olivier Grimaldi

Head tracking combined with head movements have been shown to improve auditory externalization of a virtual sound source and contribute to the performance in localization. With certain technically constrained head-tracking algorithms, as can be found in we ...

Audio Engineering Soc2023