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Many questions regarding single-hand text entry on modern smartphones (in particular, large-screen smartphones) remain under-explored, such as, (i) will the existing prevailing single-handed keyboards fit for large-screen smartphone users? and (ii) will individual customization improve single-handed keyboard performance? In this paper we study single-handed typing behaviors on several representative keyboards on large-screen mobile devices.We found that, (i) the user-adaptable-shape curved keyboard performs best among all the studied keyboards; (ii) users’ familiarity with the Qwerty layout plays a significant role at the beginning, but after several sessions of training, the user-adaptable curved keyboard can have the best learning curve and performs best; (iii) generally the statistical decoding algorithms via spatial and language models can well handle the input noise from single-handed typing.

Butterflies are not only ubiquitous around the world but are also widely known for inspiring thrill resonance, with their elegant and peculiar flights. However, realistically modeling and simulating butterfly flights—in particular, for real-time graphics and animation applications—remains an under-explored problem. In this article, we propose an efficient and practical model to simulate butterfly flights. We first model a butterfly with parametric maneuvering functions, including wing-abdomen interaction. Then, we simulate dynamic maneuvering control of the butterfly through our force-based model, which includes both the aerodynamics force and the vortex force. Through many simulation experiments and comparisons, we demonstrate that our method can efficiently simulate realistic butterfly flight motions in various real-world settings.

Abstract In this article, we present a live speech-driven, avatar-mediated, three-party telepresence system, through which three distant users, embodied as avatars in a shared 3D virtual world, can perform natural three-party telepresence that does not require tracking devices. Based on live speech input from three users, this system can real-time generate the corresponding conversational motions of all the avatars, including head motion, eye motion, lip movement, torso motion, and hand gesture. All motions are generated automatically at each user side based on live speech input, and a cloud server is utilized to transmit and synchronize motion and speech among different users. We conduct a formal user study to evaluate the usability and effectiveness of the system by comparing it with a well-known online virtual world, Second Life, and a widely-used online teleconferencing system, Skype. The user study results indicate our system can provide a measurably better telepresence user experience than the two widely-used methods.