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Advertising signage installed in public spaces is intended to be seen by passersby to increase recognition. However, display blindness often occurs because people either assume that the displayed content is not relevant to them or the display blurs into their surroundings and they remain unaware of it. To improve advertisement recognition, it is necessary to solve display blindness. Although emitting a sound might be a solution to make passersby be aware of its presence, it would become noisy and make the space discomfort. We propose the use of a pinpoint auditory glimpse that stimulates a passerby to pay attention to signage by playing a pinpoint sound. Through acoustic measurements and participant experiments conducted in a pseudo-store, it was found that (1) the use of a pinpoint auditory glimpse can effectively trigger passersby to pay attention to signage and (2) the pinpoint auditory glimpse does not negatively impact purchasing behavior, despite emitting sound. This paper presents findings on a novel sound-based solution to the problem of display blindness.

In this paper, we examine the audiovisual experience in virtual reality (VR) service context that enables a more effective interaction between a user immersed in a virtual environment (VE) and an avatar as a store staff. By utilizing the characteristics of VE experiences, we find the effects of this unrealistic relationship between the visual and auditory positions of the avatar presented to the user variable rather than uniformly presented in the same position. In this study, we conducted an experiment to investigate how the positional deviation between the sound and visual images can be tolerated in VE, the effect of positional deviation on the interpersonal distance to the avatar, and the possibility of manipulating the impression of the avatar by deviating the sound image from the visual image. For the experiment, we prepared a space resembling a VE store and conducted proximity experiments with 16 gender-balanced participants and six types of avatars. By utilizing the superiority of visual information over auditory information revealed in the experiments, we constructed an interpersonal situation with an avatar playing the role of store staff in which only the sound image intruded into the user’s personal space, and we investigated users’ impressions of the avatar. We also investigated users’ impressions of the avatar. We found the following two phenomena in the experimental conditions where the positional difference was allowed: 1) Even when the positional difference was allowed, it caused an “uncanny valley”-like phenomenon that led to a decrease in rapport; and 2) In the conditions where the positional difference was allowed when the sound image was closer than the visual image to the participant, the rapport was greater with the avatar playing the role of the store staff. This phenomenon is similar to the “foot-in-the-door” phenomenon in which small unconscious consent (i.e., allowing a sound image to intrude on one’s personal space) leads to an improvement in the evaluation of the other person (i.e., the rapport with another person). The techniques proposed in this paper, such as the positional difference between the sound and visual images, significantly improve the value of the service experiences obtained through interaction with others in VE.

The visible light communication (VLC) technique using a rolling-shutter sensor-based commercial camera has an advantage in that the LED and camera mounted on an underwater device (e.g., drone, sensor) can be effectively used as a transmitter (Tx) and a receiver (Rx), respectively, under water. On the other hand, a suitable modulation technique has not been well considered to realize a VLC system using a rolling-shutter sensor in an underwater channel that includes high ambient light conditions. In this paper, we design VLC systems using phase-shift keying (PSK), non-return-to-zero on- off keying (NRZ-OOK), and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), and evaluate them through simulations and experiments. The results suggested that the VLC system using PSK or OFDM is more resilient than that using NRZ-OOK in an underwater channel with low-frequency ambient light, and that a VLC system using PSK or NRZ-OOK is more tolerant than that using OFDM in environments with high ambient light, resulting in pixel saturation. In conclusion, the present study has demonstrated that PSK is the most suitable modulation technique for a VLC system using a rolling-shutter sensor in an underwater channel that includes high ambient light conditions.

In this paper, a robust indoor localization method using microphone pairs and asynchronous acoustic beacons was proposed. The proposed method is applicable even with a two-channel microphone pair, which is the minimal configuration of a microphone array. The proposed method estimates location by using the cross-correlation functions of the measured signals as location likelihoods. Three experiments were conducted to evaluate the proposed method. Four beacons were located at the corners of a localizing area of 4 m by 4 m and emitted signals with a bandwidth of 2 kHz. The localization results were compared to the previous method with deterministic direction-of-arrival estimation. The 90th percentiles of the localization error were 0.23 m for the proposed method with two microphones, 0.19 m for the proposed method with four microphones, and 0.30 m for the previous method under conditions without significant reverberation. Under a condition with reflective walls, the 90th percentile of the localization error of the previous method increased to 0.49 m, while that of the proposed method was only increased to 0.23 m for two microphones and 0.19 m for four microphones. The proposed method contributes to a robust localization in indoor environments and relieves the constraints of receiver configuration.