Visual perception plays a critical role in detecting changes within immersive Virtual Reality (VR) environments. However, as visual complexity increases, perceptual performance declines, making it more difficult to detect changes quickly and accurately. This study examines how visual features, known for facilitating preattentive processing, impact a change detection task in immersive 3D environments, with a focus on visual complexity, object attributes, and spatial proximity. Our results demonstrate that preattentive processing enhances change detection, particularly when the altered object is spatially isolated and not perceptually grouped with similar surrounding objects. Changes to isolated objects were detected more reliably, suggesting that perceptual isolation reduces cognitive load and draws more attention. Conversely, when a changed object was surrounded by visually similar elements, participants were less likely to detect the change, indicating that perceptual grouping hinders individual object recognition in complex scenes. These results provide guidelines for designing VR applications that strategically utilize spatial isolation and visual features to improve the user experience.

Immersive technologies such as virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) enable people to own and interact with virtual pets, offering an alternative for those who are unable to care for real pets due to spatial, physical, or financial constraints. However, how users form social bonds and emotional connections with virtual pets remains unclear and underexplored. Most virtual pet systems rely primarily on visual and auditory cues, overlooking one critical modality for emotional bonding�touch. Touch plays a fundamental role in emotional communication and social presence, particularly in human-animal interactions. Haptic feedback can fill the role of providing touch cues for users of virtual pet systems. This paper investigates how different haptic feedback modalities can influence emotional communication between users and virtual pets. We compare active haptic feedback�more specifically vibrotactile feedback�delivered through haptic gloves that respond to user interactions with a virtual dog, and passive haptic feedback, provided through a physical plush toy dog that represents the dog's body in physical space. In a within-subjects study with 32 participants, results revealed that passive haptic feedback significantly enhanced emotional bonding, social presence, and perceptions of realism, while active vibrotactile feedback contributed meaningfully in the absence of passive cues, especially in increasing behavioral engagement. These findings offer valuable design insights for emotionally resonant virtual pet systems, suggesting that passive haptics anchor affective realism, while active vibrotactile haptics enhance interactivity and compensate for reduced physical embodiment in immersive environments.

As augmented reality (AR) technologies become more integrated into everyday tasks, the design of notification systems that minimize disruption while enhancing user awareness is increasingly important. This study investigates how crossmodal interference between notification modality (visual, audio, tactile) and primary task modality (also visual, auditory, tactile) affects user perception and performance in AR environments. Through a controlled user study ($N=36$), participants engaged in modality-specific pattern recognition tasks while responding to spatial directional notifications delivered via different sensory channels. By analyzing notification awareness time, reaction time, task accuracy, and subjective measures, such as cognitive load and user preference, the study reveals how congruency or mismatch between task and notification modalities can either facilitate or hinder attention redirection and multi-tasking efficiency. The findings contribute to the design of adaptive AR notification systems that are less intrusive and better aligned with users' perceptual and cognitive states.

Mid-air navigation offers a method of aerial travel that mitigates the constraints associated with continuous navigation. A mid-air selection technique is essential to enable such navigation. In this paper, we consider four variations of intersection-based bimanual midair selection techniques with visual aids and supporting features: Simple-Ray, Simple-Stripe, Precision-Stripe, and Cursor-Sync. We evaluate their performance and user experience compared to an unimanual mid-air selection technique using two tasks that require selecting a mid-air position with or without a reference object. Our findings indicate that the bimanual techniques generally demonstrate faster selection times compared to the unimanual technique. With a supporting feature, the bimanual techniques can provide a more accurate selection than the unimanual technique. Based on our results, we discuss the effect of selection technique’s visual aids and supporting features on performance and user experience for mid-air selection.

Augmented reality (AR) provides users with a unique social space where virtual objects are natural parts of the real world. The users can interact with 3D virtual objects and virtual humans projected onto the physical environment. This work examines perceived ownership based on the reality of objects and partners, as well as object controllability in a shared AR setting. Our formal user study with 28 participants shows a sense of possession, control, separation, and partner presence affect their perceived ownership of a shared object. Finally, we discuss the findings and present a conclusion.

In our lives, we encounter various stressors that may cause negative mental and bodily reactions to make us feel frustrated, angry, or irritated. Effective methods to manage or reduce stress and anxiety are essential for a healthy life, and several stress-management approaches are found to be useful for stress relief, such as meditation, taking a rest, walking around nature, or even breaking things in a smash room. Previous research has revealed that certain experiences in virtual reality (VR) are effective for reducing stress as traditional real-world methods. However, it is still unclear how the stress relief effects are associated with other factors like individual user profile in terms of different treatment activities. In this paper, we report our findings from a formal user study that investigates the effects of two virtual activities: (1) VR Meditation and (2) VR Smash Room experience, compared with a traditional Sitting-in-Silence method. Our results show that VR Meditation has a better stress relief effect compared to VR Smash Room and Sitting-in-Silence, and the effects of the treatments are correlated with the participants’ personalities. We discuss the findings and implications addressing potential benefits/impacts of different stress-relief activities in VR.

Change blindness is a phenomenon where an individual fails to notice alterations in a visual scene when a change occurs during a brief interruption or distraction. Understanding this phenomenon is specifically important for the technique that uses a visual stimulus, such as Virtual Reality (VR) or Augmented Reality (AR). Previous research had primarily focused on 2D environments or conducted limited controlled experiments in 3D immersive environments. In this paper, we design and conduct two formal user experiments to investigate the effects of different visual attention-disrupting conditions (Flickering and Head-Turning) and object alternative conditions (Removal, Color Alteration, and Size Alteration) on change blindness detection in VR and AR environments. Our results reveal that participants detected changes more quickly and had a higher detection rate with Flickering compared to Head-Turning. Furthermore, they spent less time detecting changes when an object disappeared compared to changes in color or size. Additionally, we provide a comparison of the results between VR and AR environments.

This paper introduces PORTAL (POrtal widget for Remote Target Acquisition and controL) that allows the user to interact with out-of-reach objects in a virtual environment. We describe the PORTAL interaction technique for placing a portal widget and interacting with target objects through the portal. We conduct two formal user studies to evaluate PORTAL for selection and manipulation functionalities. The results show PORTAL supports participants to interact with remote objects successfully and precisely. Following that, we discuss its potential and limitations, and future works.