In mixed reality (MR) telepresence applications, the differences between participants' physical environments can interfere with effective collaboration. For asymmetric tasks, users might need to access different resources (information, objects, tools) distributed throughout their room. Existing intersection methods do not support such interactions, because a large portion of the telepresence participants' rooms become inaccessible, along with the relevant task resources. We propose MRUnion, a Mixed Reality Telepresence pipeline for asymmetric task-aware 3D mutual scene generation. The key concept of our approach is to enable a user in an asymmetric telecollaboration scenario to access the entire room, while still being able to communicate with remote users in a shared space. For this purpose, we introduce a novel mutual room layout called Union. We evaluated 882 space combinations quantitatively involving two, three, and four combined remote spaces and compared it to a conventional Intersect room layout. The results show that our method outperforms existing intersection methods and enables a significant increase in space and accessibility to resources within the shared space. In an exploratory user study (N=24), we investigated the applicability of the synthetic mutual scene in both MR and VR setups, where users collaborated on an asymmetric remote assembly task. The study results showed that our method achieved comparable results to the intersect method but requires further investigation in terms of social presence, safety and support of collaboration. From this study, we derived design implications for synthetic mutual spaces.

The vision of a ‘metaverse’ may soon bring a ubiquitous(ly) Augmented Reality (UAR) delivering context-aware, geo-located, and continuous blends of real and virtual elements into reach. This paper draws on speculative design to explore, question, and problematize consequences of AR becoming pervasive. Elaborating on Desjardin et al.’s bespoke booklets, we co-speculate together with 12 globally dispersed participants. Each participant received a custom-made design workbook containing pictures of their immediate surroundings, which they elaborated on in situated brainstorming activities. We present an integration of their speculative ideas and lived experiences in 3 overarching themes from which 7 ‘dark’ scenarios caused by UAR were formed. The Scenarios are indicative of deceptive design patterns that can (and likely will be) devised to misuse UAR, and anti-patterns that could cause unintended consequences. These contributions enable the timely discussion of potential antidotes and to which extent they can mitigate imminent harms of UAR.

We present our interdisciplinary research on gamification as a communication tool in urban planning. Approaching the topic from a user-centered perspective, we combine knowledge from the domains of architecture and human-computer interaction and define domain-specific requirements and areas of interest. To substantiate our findings, we present a prototypical case study of a public participation application, developed in consultation with the urban planning project driver and evaluated on-location with members of the public. Our results highlight the opportunities in pursuing a new sub-field of gamification within urban planning and include concepts of game interfaces and spaces in this research. In our case study, we present a methodological approach to assessing gamification in urban planning participation and provide findings on how gamification changes the users’ relationship to participation as well as evidence that the “avatar” game element can affect the motivational affordances meaning of task, perceived competence, and social relatedness.

Augmented Reality (AR) is increasingly considered for use in real industrial applications [8]. In our industrial research lab at Siemens Technology, we are continuously discussing suitable AR scenarios in business sectors involving power plants, wind turbine plants, and oil and gas factories. We have developed a company-internal AR system architecture, Hololayer, which provides AR facilities in a reusable manner to development engineers such that they can build their own AR applications for their specialized use cases. The integration of AR technology into industrial processes encounters many complex issues: we need to adhere to many safety, security and quality guarantees while also adapting quickly to the rapidly changing state of the art of AR devices (HMDs, tablets). To increase flexibility, it might be good to integrate Hololayer with one of the open frameworks that have recently been proposed [11], [29], [38]. Yet, care must be taken when converting an already existing, large company-owned framework like Hololayer to such platforms. Some of the proposed standardized APIs and communication protocols may be difficult to abide by, without requiring significant rewriting efforts or even violating company-internal regulations. In this paper, we report on our efforts to combine Hololayer with one such platform, Ubi-Interact [38]. This is a collaboration between Siemens technology and the FAR group at TU Munich. After exemplary descriptions of typical application scenarios, we present the underlying principles of Hololayer to support this range of applications. We then describe rudimentary concepts of Ubi-Interact, followed by an elaboration on the efforts to combine both systems for a selected application scenario and a discussion of the results achieved thus far.

Two-factor authentication (2FA) is a recommended or imposed authentication mechanism for valuable online assets. However, 2FA mechanisms usually exhibit user experience issues that create user friction and even lead to poor acceptance, hampering the wider spread of 2FA. In this article, we investigate user perceptions of 2FA through in-depth interviews with 42 participants, revealing key requirements that are not well met today despite recently emerged 2FA solutions. First, we investigate past experiences with authentication mechanisms emphasizing problems and aspects that hamper good user experience. Second, we investigate the different authentication factors more closely. Our results reveal particularly interesting preferences regarding the authentication factor “ownership” in terms of properties, physical realizations, and interaction. These findings suggest a path toward 2FA mechanisms with considerably better user experience, promising to improve the acceptance and hence, the proliferation of 2FA for the benefit of security in the digital world.