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In virtual environments, many social cues (e.g. gestures, eye contact, and proximity) are currently conveyed visually or auditorily. Indicating social cues in other modalities, such as haptic cues to complement visual or audio signals, will help to increase VR’s accessibility and take advantage of the platform’s inherent flexibility. However, accessibility implementations in social VR are often siloed by single sensory modalities. To broaden the accessibility of social virtual reality beyond replacing one sensory modality with another, we identified a subset of social cues and built tools to enhance them allowing users to switch between modalities to choose how these cues are represented. Because consumer VR uses primarily visual and auditory stimuli, we started with social cues that were not accessible for blind and low vision (BLV) and d/Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) people, and expanded how they could be represented to accommodate a number of needs. We describe how these tools were designed around the principle of social cue switching, and a standard distribution method to amplify reach. 

Abstract Brownian coating thermal noise in detector test masses is limiting the sensitivity of current gravitational-wave detectors on Earth. Therefore, accurate numerical models can inform the ongoing effort to minimize Brownian coating thermal noise in current and future gravitational-wave detectors. Such numerical models typically require significant computational resources and time, and often involve closed-source commercial codes. In contrast, open-source codes give complete visibility and control of the simulated physics, enable direct assessment of the numerical accuracy, and support the reproducibility of results. In this article, we use the open-sourceSpECTREnumerical relativity code and adopt a novel discontinuous Galerkin numerical method to model Brownian coating thermal noise. We demonstrate thatSpECTREachieves significantly higher accuracy than a previous approach at a fraction of the computational cost. Furthermore, we numerically model Brownian coating thermal noise in multiple sub-wavelength crystalline coating layers for the first time. Our new numerical method has the potential to enable fast exploration of realistic mirror configurations, and hence to guide the search for optimal mirror geometries, beam shapes and coating materials for gravitational-wave detectors.