Aims. The Antarctica Search for Transiting Extrasolar Planets (ASTEP), an automatized 400 mm telescope located at Concordia station in Antarctica, monitored β Pictoris continuously to detect any variability linked to the transit of the Hill sphere of its planet β Pictoris b. The long observation sequence, from March to September 2017, combined with the quality and high level duty cycle of our data, enables us to detect and analyse the δ Scuti pulsations of the star. Methods. Time series photometric data were obtained using aperture photometry by telescope defocussing. The 66 418 data points were analysed using the software package Period04. We only selected frequencies with amplitudes that exceed four times the local noise level in the amplitude spectrum. Results. We detect 31 δ Scuti pulsation frequencies, 28 of which are new detections. All the frequencies detected are in the interval 34.76−75.68 d −1 . We also find that β Pictoris exhibits at least one pulsation mode that varies in amplitude over our monitoring duration of seven months.
In the last few years, Extended reality (XR) has enabled novel forms of sensory experiences and social interplay, which can be hardly experienced in real life. However, the full potential of XR has not been exploited yet, since vision remains the main interaction modality, and the time-and spacemodulation of the sense of self -which could open interesting perspectives in several scenarios -is still largely unexplored. To pave the path to a multi-modal manipulation of the sense of time and space in immersive XR, in this work we discuss the preliminary outcomes of the first investigation in the visualtactile domain of two well known perceptual illusions affecting spatial and temporal perception, i.e. Tau and Kappa effects, respectively. We compared the effects originated from unimodal stimulation (i.e., only visual or tactile) with the same effects induced by convergent bimodal stimulation (i.e., visual and tactile), delivered to the forearm. Results show that both Tau and Kappa effects are affected by the multi-modality of the stimulation, and that the perceptual bias differently affects time-or space-perception based on the modality used for stimulus delivery. Our results, although preliminary, seem to suggest that multimodal perceptual illusions could be a viable solution for time-and space-modulation of the sense of self in immersive XR and advanced social human-robot interaction.
For its versatility, Python has become one of the most popular programming languages. In spite of its possibility to straightforwardly link native code with powerful libraries for scientific computing, the use of Python for real-time sound applications development is often neglected in favor of alternative programming languages, which are tailored to the digital music domain. This article introduces Python as a real-time software programming tool to interested readers, including Python developers who are new to the real time or, conversely, sound programmers who have not yet taken this language into consideration. Cython and Numba are proposed as libraries supporting agile development of efficient software running at machine level. Moreover, it is shown that refactoring few critical parts of the program under these libraries can dramatically improve the performances of a sound algorithm. Such improvements can be directly benchmarked within Python, thanks to the existence of appropriate code parsing resources. After introducing a simple sound processing example, two algorithms that are known from the literature are coded to show how Python can be effectively employed to program sound software. Finally, issues of efficiency are mainly discussed in terms of latency of the resulting applications. Overall, such issues suggest that the use of real-time Python should be limited to the prototyping phase, where the benefits of language flexibility prevail on low latency requirements, for instance, needed during computer music live performances.
The spatial and temporal dimensions of a subjective experience are intertwined. In the Kappa effect, the spatial distance between consecutive visual stimuli proportionally influences the perceived duration of the inter-stimulus interval. Despite its relevance, to our knowledge no study has investigated such an illusory effect in concurrent multimodal perception through visual and tactile elicitations. To overcome this limitation, we characterise the Kappa effect on vision and somatosensation also through the assessment of duration perception in the sub-second range when sensory inputs are delivered on the palm or forearm using wearable devices. The effect of unimodal visual/tactile elicitations was also compared to several bimodal stimulations. Results showed that the illusory effect, which arose in both unimodal conditions, produces significantly higher distortions in vision. In the multimodal condition, when visual stimuli were at not-equidistant spatial locations, the integration with the tactile channel did not diminish the Kappa effect. Conversely, the Kappa effect vanished when the visual stimuli were at equidistant spatial locations, independently from the tactile stimuli location. These findings shed light on the human perceptual mechanisms, suggesting that the perceptual channel with lower variance in the spatial discrimination has a preeminent role in determining illusory perceptions in the time domain.
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