Technologies that help users overcome their limitations and integrate with the human body are often termed “human augmentations”. Such technologies are now available on the consumer market, potentially supporting people in their everyday activities. To date, there is no systematic understanding of the perception of human augmentations yet. To address this gap and build an understanding of how to design positive experiences with human augmentations, we conducted a mixed-method study of the perception of augmented humans (AHs). We conducted two scenario-based studies: interviews (n = 16) and an online study (n = 506) with participants from four countries. The scenarios include one out of three augmentation categories (sensory, motor, and cognitive) and specify if the augmented person has a disability or not. Overall, results show that the type of augmentation and disability impacted user attitudes towards AHs. We derive design dimensions for creating technological augmentations for a diverse and global audience.

Mid-air haptics allow bare-hand tactile stimulation; however, it has a constrained workspace, making it unsuitable for room-scale haptics. We present a novel approach to rendering mid-air haptic sensations in a large rendering volume by turning a static array into a dynamic array following the user's hand. We used a 6DOF robot to drive a haptic ultrasound array over a large 3D space. Our system enables rendering room-scale mid-air experiences while preserving bare-hand interaction, thus, providing tangibility for virtual environments. To evaluate our approach, we performed three evaluations. First, we performed a technical system evaluation, showcasing the feasibility of such a system. Next, we conducted three psychophysical experiments, showing that the motion does not affect the user's perception with high likelihood. Lastly, we explored seven use cases that showcase our system's potential using a user study. We discuss challenges and opportunities in how large-scale mid-air haptics can contribute toward room-scale haptic feedback. Thus, with our system, we contribute to general haptic mid-air feedback on a large scale.

Many individuals with visual impairments have residual vision that often remains underused by assistive technologies. Head-mounted augmented reality (AR) devices can provide assistance, by recoding difficult-to-perceive information into a visual format that is more accessible. Here, we evaluate symbolic and alphanumeric information representations for their efficiency and usability in two prototypical AR applications: namely, recognizing facial expressions of conversational partners and reading the time. We find that while AR provides a general benefit, the complexity of the visual representations has to be matched to the user’s visual acuity.

Learning to read Braille is crucial to academic success for people with blindness or severe visual impairment. In our work, we investigate how we can support early learning of Braille with tangible computing. In a human-centered inclusive design process with interviews, six design iterations with prototypes, and feedback from experts, students, and teachers, we created BrailleBuddy. BrailleBuddy is a tangible user interface supporting children with visual impairments in learning Braille. We evaluated BrailleBuddy in a user study with children with blindness. Our results show that BrailleBuddy provides intrinsic motivation for learning Braille and can be used by children without supervision. BrailleBuddy complements the educational program as it allows children to play with and explore Braille characters at their own pace, thus lowering the challenge of learning to read Braille. In addition, an open-source toolkit is provided to enable educators and researchers to support individual requirements.

Residual visual capabilities and the associated phenomenological experience can differ significantly between persons with similar visual acuity and similar diagnosis. There is a substantial variance in situations and tasks that persons with low vision find challenging. Smartglasses provide the opportunity of presenting individualized visual feedback targeted to each user’s requirements. Here, we interviewed nine persons with low vision to obtain insight into their subjective perceptual experience associated with factors such as illumination, color, contrast, and movement, as well as context factors. Further, we contribute a collection of everyday activities that rely on visual perception as well as strategies participants employ in their everyday lives. We find that our participants rely on their residual vision as the dominant sense in many different everyday activities. They prefer vision to other modalities if they can perceive the information visually, which highlights the need for assistive devices with visual feedback.