Mixed Reality (MR) presents novel opportunities to investigate how individuals perceive themselves and others during shared, augmented experiences within a common physical environment. Previous research has demonstrated that users can embody avatars in MR, temporarily extending their sense of self. However, there has been limited exploration of body-swapping, a condition in which two individuals simultaneously inhabit each other's avatars, and its potential effects on social interaction in immersive environments. To address this gap, we adapted the Joint Simon Task (JST), a wellestablished implicit paradigm, to examine how body-swapping influences the cognitive and perceptual boundaries between self and other. Our results indicate that body-swapping led participants to experience themselves and their partner as functioning like a single, unified system, as in two bodies operating as one agent. This suggests possible cognitive and perceptual changes that go beyond simple collaboration. Our findings have significant implications for the design of MR systems intended to support collaboration, empathy, social learning, and therapeutic interventions through shared embodiment.

Virtual Reality (VR) technologies offer compelling experiences by allowing users to immerse themselves in simulated environments interacting through avatars. However, despite its ability to evoke emotional responses, and seeing 'through the eyes' of the displayed other, it remains unclear to what extent VR actually fosters perspective-taking (PT) or thinking about others' thoughts and feelings. It might be that the common belief that one can "become someone else" through VR is misleading, and that engaging situations through a different viewpoint does not produce a different cognitive standpoint. To test this, we conducted a 2 (perspective, first-person or third-person) by 2 (perspective-taking task or no task) to examine effects on perspective taking, measured via audio-recordings afforded by the think-aloud protocol. Our data demonstrate that while first-person perspective (1PP) facilitates perceived embodiment, it has no appreciable influence on perspective-taking. Regardless of 1PP or third-person perspective (3PP), perspective-taking was substantially and significantly increased when users were given a specific task prompting them to actively consider a character's perspective. Without such tasks, it seems that participants default to their own viewpoints. These data highlight the need for intentional design in VR experiences to consider content rather than simply viewpoint as key to authentic perspective-taking. To truly harness VR's potential as an "empathy machine," developers must integrate targeted perspective-taking tasks or story prompts, ensuring that cognitive engagement is an active component of the experience.

In this paper, we empirically investigate VR users’ subjective experiences of realism. We conceptualise two operationally distinct processes: a top-down critical evaluation of realism and a bottom-up felt experience of realism. Study 1 investigated the latent factor structure of a measure of subjective realism responses to different virtual environments. Results indicated a three-factor structure: (i) felt realism – user’s feelings of realism, (ii) perceptual realism – evaluation of the realism of stimulus form or perceptual elements, and (iii) conceptual realism – evaluation of stimulus content or conceptual elements. Study 2 investigated the effect of two “objective realism” manipulations on the three “subjective realism” factors. We manipulated the visual quality and normality of the virtual setting. Results indicated that participants rated abnormal environments lower in perceptual realism and conceptual realism. However, the abnormal environments were reported higher in felt realism. The findings demonstrate the power of abnormal and “unreal” environments in inducing subjective realism for entertainment users. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, this research was conducted using 360 video stimuli, future research should test these findings with full HMD VR.

Virtual reality (VR) has emerged as a promising technology for remote teamwork; it allows individuals to collaborate in real-time via virtual avatars that convey body language and other nonverbal cues not available via traditional communication mechanisms. However, there is not much known about how the characteristics of these avatars affect the social interactions taking place in these environments. To bridge this gap, we investigate how avatar clothing influences group dynamics during team collaboration in VR. Particularly, we observe the difference between team dynamics when groups are dressed formally and casually. We asked groups of participants to report on their personality, complete two decision-making tasks while wearing different clothing, and report on their perceptions of work group inclusion and entitativity afterwards. We found that clothing had no influence on inclusion and entitativity, but personality did.

Media research has conceptualised realism of media and technology in many different ways e.g., visual fidelity, presence, narrative consistency. We build on a dual process model of subjective realism, categorising evaluative realism (comparison of stimulus to real life) and felt realism (illusion of felt non-mediation). This study explored subjective realism using a 2 × 2 design (N = 103) with two between-groups variables [perceptual cue (presence of interactive eye-gaze from virtual character) and conceptual cue (presence of narrative frame)]. Findings indicated how perceptual and conceptual cues interact; users reported that eye-gaze was evaluatively unrealistic, but eye-gaze accompanied by narrative framing resulted in higher self-reported felt realism. Perceptual cues alone may not increase felt realism without sufficient narrative explanation to contextualise the experience. Findings are integrated with theory and implications for a model of subjective realism are discussed.

Smart rings are an emerging wearable technology particularly suitable for discrete notifications based on haptic cues. Previous work mostly focused on tactile actuators that stimulate only specific skin receptors on the finger, resulting in limited information expressiveness. We propose tactoRing, a novel tactile display that, by dragging a small tactor on the skin around the finger, excites multiple skin areas resulting in more accurate cue recognition. In this paper, we present the hardware and a perception study to understand the ability of users to recognize eight distinct points around the finger. Moreover, we show two different techniques to encode information through skin-dragging motion with accuracy up to 94%. We finally showcase a set of applications that, by combining sequences of tactile stimuli, achieve higher expressiveness than prior methods.

An embedding $$i \mapsto p_i\in \mathbb {R}^d$$ of the vertices of a graph G is called universally completable if the following holds: For any other embedding $$i\mapsto q_i~\in \mathbb {R}^{k}$$ satisfying $$q_i^{T}q_j = p_i^{T}p_j$$ for $$i = j$$ and i adjacent to j, there exists an isometry mapping $$q_i$$ to $$p_i$$ for all $$ i\in V(G)$$ . The notion of universal completability was introduced recently due to its relevance to the positive semidefinite matrix completion problem. In this work we focus on graph embeddings constructed using the eigenvectors of the least eigenvalue of the adjacency matrix of G, which we call least eigenvalue frameworks. We identify two necessary and sufficient conditions for such frameworks to be universally completable. Our conditions also allow us to give algorithms for determining whether a least eigenvalue framework is universally completable. Furthermore, our computations for Cayley graphs on $$\mathbb {Z}_2^n \ (n \le 5)$$ show that almost all of these graphs have universally completable least eigenvalue frameworks. In the second part of this work we study uniquely vector colorable (UVC) graphs, i.e., graphs for which the semidefinite program corresponding to the Lovász theta number (of the complementary graph) admits a unique optimal solution. We identify a sufficient condition for showing that a graph is UVC based on the universal completability of an associated framework. This allows us to prove that Kneser and q-Kneser graphs are UVC. Lastly, we show that least eigenvalue frameworks of 1-walk-regular graphs always provide optimal vector colorings and furthermore, we are able to characterize all optimal vector colorings of such graphs. In particular, we give a necessary and sufficient condition for a 1-walk-regular graph to be uniquely vector colorable.