Augmented Reality can induce illusory perceptions of heat when users experience virtual flames rendered on their hands. In this exploratory study, we used high-density electroencephalography to investigate the neural correlates associated with this experience. We recorded neural activity in a within-subjects design during three key audiovisual conditions: (A) lifelike virtual flames on the hand paired with a burning sound; (B) a non-fire-like control stimulus (green, downward-flowing visuals with a synthetic sound) on the hand; and (C) realistic flames presented between the hands. Our preliminary analyses revealed distinct electroencephalography signatures between the Fire-on-Hand condition and both control conditions. Our findings suggest that AR-induced thermal illusions may engage brain networks involved in somatosensation, multisensory body representation, and spatial attention. This top-down, predictive mechanism appears to recruit neural systems that overlap with those involved in the higher-order cortical processing of actual thermal stimuli.

Redirected Walking (RDW) enables navigation in large virtual worlds by manipulating a user's viewpoint, yet the perceptual thresholds governing these manipulations are often treated as fixed sensory limits. In this work, we propose the concept of Semantic Anchors: objects that stabilise self-motion perception through high-level cognitive priors. In a psychophysical experiment $(N=22)$, participants judged virtual rotations while viewing familiar or arbitrary objects of varying sizes and rotational reference frames. Results reveal that scene semantics do not merely modulate thresholds but fundamentally alter the integration of spatial cues. When a familiar object's canonical size was violated to create a specific size-congruency conflict, the window for imperceptible redirection expanded significantly, allowing rotation gains of up to 30% to remain imperceptible. Crucially, familiarity inverted the geometric dependence observed with arbitrary shapes: while geometric frames dictated sensitivity for abstract objects, semantic stability dominated for familiar ones. These findings demonstrate that RDW thresholds are dynamically co-constructed by sensory input and scene plausibility, offering a new principle for designing semantically informed locomotion systems that leverage cognitive expectations to expand explorable space.

In the Burning Hand Illusion (BHI), participants perceive illusory heat as they observe virtual flames on their hands in Augmented Reality. In this study, we investigate the role of stimulus location within peri-hand space and its resemblance to a realistic fire in the emergence of the illusion. Additionally, we examine the associated autonomic nervous responses, quantified through skin conductance and pupil dilation responses. We used the following four conditions: (A) Realistic flames on the right hand paired with the sound of a burning torch; (B) Green, flame-like visuals on the hand paired with a sound that does not evoke fire but is spectrally matched to the sound of the burning torch; (C) Realistic flames between the hands; and (D) Green, flame-like visuals between the hands. Sixteen out of twenty-five participants reported feeling heat in condition (A), while seven reported a sensation of warmth in condition (C). Condition (B) introduced ambiguity, as participants reported warmth as well as cold sensations, but overall, fewer participants reported thermal illusions. No participants reported thermal illusions in (D). These findings suggest that both the location and resemblance of the flames significantly influence the emergence of the BHI, with the response diminishing as the flames become less plausible or not placed on the actual hand. Skin conductance responses were highest in condition (A) and lower in condition (C), with the lowest responses observed in conditions (B) and (D). Pupil dilation responses were largest in conditions where the flames were directly on the hand. The observed autonomic responses reinforce the notion that the BHI elicits physiological effects that parallel those of real thermal stimuli. This provides evidence that the virtual fire in the BHI is sufficiently plausible to be perceived as affecting the hand, and is consequently processed by the brain’s homeostatic emotional systems.

Chinese families usually place a strong emphasis on maintaining a sense of integrality even after the children have grown up. However, this might pose challenges in remote communication. For instance, over-frequent remote communication may disturb each other's life; and because of Chinese people's conservative way of expression, pervasive communication tools, such as video or voice calls, cannot communicate each other's emotions conveniently. To enhance remote communication between Chinese parents and their adult children, we employed a three-stage design process to identify the target users' needs in remote communication and presented WhisperCup. Our study indicated that WhisperCup could unintentionally increase daily communication between Chinese parents and adult children. The awareness system embedded in the WhisperCup prototype could provide a glimpse of each other's daily life, helping virtually engage in each other's life. Additionally, we found that WhisperCup could facilitate a better understanding of each other's lives while addressing privacy concerns.

3D modelling and printing are becoming increasingly popular. However, beginners often face high barriers of entry when trying to use existing 3D modelling tools, even for creating simple objects. This is further complicated on mobile devices by the lack of direct manipulation in the Z dimension. In this paper, we explore the possibility of using foldable mobile devices for modelling simple objects by constructing a 2.5D display and interaction space with folded touch screens. We present a set of novel interaction techniques - AngleCAD, which allows users to view and navigate a 3D space through folded screens, and to modify the 3D object using the physical support of touchscreens and folding angles. The design of these techniques was inspired by woodworking practices to support surface-based operations that allow users to cut, snap and taper objects directly with the touch screen, and extrude and drill them according to the physical fold angle. A preliminary study identified the benefits of this approach and the key design factors that affect the user experience.

Latest hardware improvements on transceivers supporting Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) make it feasible to connect small battery powered devices hundred of meters or even km away. In this paper, we propose a physical computing paradigm fully exploiting this novel technology. Spatial physical computing (SPC) leverages not only natural manipulation typically used on TUI and construction kits but also integrates the necessary deambulation (around a building or a city) in the process of creating, testing and tuning a distributed smart sensor/actuator network. The overall system is a compound of (an unlimited) set of independent data-processing nodes supporting an event-driven data-flow programming scheme. We demonstrate in a few examples how such networks can be deployed Spatially programmed - through intuitive physical actions, and discuss the unique qualities and challenges of Spatial Physical Computing.

We present here a first prototype of the Virtual Haptic Radar (VHR), a wearable device helping actors become aware of the presence of invisible virtual objects in their path when evolving in a virtual studio (such as a "bluescreen" filming stage [Figure 1]). The VHR is a natural extension of the Haptic Radar (HR) and its principle [Cassinelli et al. 2006] in the realm of virtual reality: while each module of the HR had a small vibrator and a rangefinder to measure distance to real obstacles, the VHR module lacks the rangefinder but accommodates instead a (cheap) ultrasound-based indoor positioning system that gives it the ability to know exactly where it is situated relatively to an external frame of reference.