While visual augmentation dominates the augmented reality landscape, devices like Meta Ray-Ban audio smart glasses signal growing industry movement toward audio augmented reality (AAR). Hearing is a primary channel for sensing context, anticipating change, and navigating social space, yet AAR's everyday potential remains underexplored. We address this gap through a collaborative autoethnography (N=5, authoring) and an online survey (N=74). We identify ten roles for AAR, grouped into three categories: task- and utility-oriented, emotional and social, and perceptual collaborator. These roles are further layered with a rhythmic and embodied collaborator framing, mapping them onto micro-, meso-, and macro-rhythms of everyday life. Our analysis surfaces nuanced tensions, such as blocking distractions without erasing social presence, highlighting the need for context-aware design. This paper contributes a foundational and forward-looking framework for AAR in everyday life, providing design groundwork for systems attuned to daily routines, sensory engagement, and social expectations.

With growing investment in consumer augmented reality (AR) headsets and glasses, wearable AR is moving from niche applications to everyday use. However, current research primarily examines AR in controlled settings, offering limited insights into its use in real-world daily life. To address this gap, we adopt a digital ethnographic approach, analysing 27 hours of 112 YouTube videos featuring early adopters. These videos capture usage ranging from continuous periods of hours to intermittent use over weeks and months. Our analysis shows that currently, wearable AR is primarily used for media consumption and gaming. While productivity is a desired use case, frequent use is constrained by current hardware limitations and the nascent application ecosystem. Users seek continuity in their digital experience, desiring functionalities similar to those on smartphones, tablets, or computers. We propose implications for everyday AR development that promote adoption while ensuring safe, ethical, and socially-aware integration into daily life.

Obtaining feedback from time-constrained end-users is a major challenge in evaluating novel systems for specialised applications. The performance and feedback of engineers and surgeons was evaluated through an experiment where participants were asked to identify tumour locations within an anatomically realistic silicon liver model across three different conditions of an Augmented Reality (AR) prototype system (Baseline, Split AR and Full AR). Our findings show that engineers and surgeons share some similarities in their performance, feedback and behaviour, particularly when reliance on the AR system is high for both groups. However, engineers typically focus more on accuracy of the image alignment and are more accurate in their responses when supported by AR. Senior surgeons typically perform faster and use AR as supplementary information, while the performance of junior surgeons is more closely aligned to the performance of engineers. We conclude that engineers could be involved in preliminary evaluations of a surgical system or in evaluations of systems which are aimed at training junior surgeons, but that it is essential to involve surgeons in later evaluations, where ecological validity is a more important consideration.

Augmented Reality (AR) is considered to be a promising technology for the guidance of laparoscopic liver surgery. By overlaying pre-operative 3D information of the liver and internal blood vessels on the laparoscopic view, surgeons can better understand the location of critical structures. In an effort to enable AR, several authors have focused on the development of methods to obtain an accurate alignment between the laparoscopic video image and the pre-operative 3D data of the liver, without assessing the benefit that the resulting overlay can provide during surgery. In this paper, we present a study that aims to assess quantitatively and qualitatively the value of an AR overlay in laparoscopic surgery during a simulated surgical task on a phantom setup. We design a study where participants are asked to physically localise pre-operative tumours in a liver phantom using three image guidance conditions - a baseline condition without any image guidance, a condition where the 3D surfaces of the liver are aligned to the video and displayed on a black background, and a condition where video see-through AR is displayed on the laparoscopic video. Using data collected from a cohort of 24 participants which include 12 surgeons, we observe that compared to the baseline, AR decreases the median localisation error of surgeons on non-peripheral targets from 25.8 mm to 9.2 mm. Using subjective feedback, we also identify that AR introduces usability improvements in the surgical task and increases the perceived confidence of the users. Between the two tested displays, the majority of participants preferred to use the AR overlay instead of navigated view of the 3D surfaces on a separate screen. We conclude that AR has the potential to improve performance and decision making in laparoscopic surgery, and that improvements in overlay alignment accuracy and depth perception should be pursued in the future.

The nascent field of biodesign creates novel applications of life sciences through design methods. Biodesign has the potential to shift interactive computational systems from using purely digital components to systems that integrate living organisms. However, there is a lack of understanding of biodesign and how it advances HCI. We present a review of 41 papers published in ACM Digital Library, IEEE Explore digital library and the Design and Applied Arts Index. We found that existing literature describes aspects of biodesign theory, design processes and artifacts, and educational environments, but not holistically. Based on the findings, we define biodesign as the application of the bioaffordances of an organism. We contribute the Bio-Inquiry model: a methodology connecting user-centered, scientific and critical inquiries to inform the design of interactive artifacts. We discuss the opportunities at the intersection of biodesign and HCI to consider the nature of future technologies.

Many people, especially those in sedentary occupations, fail to achieve the recommended levels of physical activity. Virtual reality (VR) games have the potential to overcome this because they are fun and also can be physically demanding. This paper explores whether a VR game studio can help workers in sedentary jobs to get valuable levels of exercise. We studied how 11 participants used our VR game studio in a sedentary workplace over 8-weeks and their perceptions of the experience. We analysed the physical exertion in the VR game studio, comparing this to their step counts from a smartwatch. All participants achieved valuable levels of physical activity and mood benefits. Importantly, for 6 participants, only with the VR game studio did they meet recommended activity levels. Our key contributions are insights about the use of a workplace VR game studio and its health benefits.

The delivery of ongoing training and support to Advanced Life Support (ALS) teams poses significant resourcing and logistical challenges. A reduced exposure to cardiac arrests and mandated re-accreditation pose further challenges for educators to overcome. This work presents the ALS-SimVR (Advanced Life Support Simulation in VR) application. The application is intended for use as a supplementary training and refresher asset for ALS team leaders. The purpose of the application is to allow critical care clinicians to rehearse the role of ALS Team leader in their own time and location of choice. The application was developed for the Oculus-Go and ported to the Oculus-Quest. The application is also supported for a desktop and server based streaming release.

Exercise is important for health and well-being. However, for many people, it can be hard to find the time or motivation to get the recommended amount of exercise. It has recently become apparent that virtual reality exergames, have the potential to address this problem, by helping people stay motivated to exercise. This research explores how to harness the motivating power of virtual reality exergames to support long-term physical activity. We do this by creating an infrastructure that captures data from virtual reality games, with physical data captured by sensors, then using this to provide a personal dashboard of in-game exertion and measures of fitness.

Virtual reality (VR) exergames have the potential to be a fun way to get exercise. People have different preferences and responses when it comes to both exercising an playing games, meaning that there are potential benefits from creating a user model for exergaming. This could support various forms of personalization, such as game recommenders, and personalization within a game. We define a VR exergame user model, VRex, that represents a user's exertion as well a their goals and preferences for exercise and for games We illustrate the use of VRex to represent 1 users who played 4 games, based on data about their actual and perceived exertion and their satisfaction with each game. This demonstrates the diversity of the user models, in terms of the user model's components. This is the first work to explore the design of user models for virtual reality exergames and has the potential to serve as a foundation for game personalization, recommenders and open model interfaces.