Transitions between "realities" play an important role in designing XR experiences, as they significantly influence user experience.However, integrating these transitions into XR applications poses a significant challenge on multiple levels, including both technical and design aspects.Although this challenge has been tackled over the past decade, existing efforts seem to be fragmented, often examining different issues in isolation.This paper aims to address this issue by conducting a systematic literature review of research related to transitions between realities using XR technology.The study seeks to provide an overview of these transitions, enhancing our understanding of the relevant elements and structures involved in the process.The review covers 38 papers from the Scopus and ACM DL databases.To provide the current state of research, we classify the literature into three main themes: research topics, application domains, and transition entities.Our findings reveal three research gaps in this area: 1) limited exploration of XR transitions across diverse domains, 2) contradictions in the transition metaphor, and 3) a lack of comprehensive understanding of XR transitions across multiple scales.In conclusion, we outline future research opportunities aimed at advancing knowledge in the field.

This paper presents a Research Through Design investigation exploring innovative approaches to industrial heritage interpretation through extended reality (XR) technologies and narrative design. Using the historic Finlayson Factory in Tampere, Finland as a case study, we developed "Who Killed Helene Pumpulivaara?" - an interactive heritage experience that combines crime mystery narrative with XR technology to address key challenges in digital heritage interpretation, particularly decontextualization and accessibility. Our methodology used emerging AI tools and accessible technologies to create a multi-platform experience implemented across web and VR environments. The research revealed several significant findings: first, the varying fidelity levels between AI-generated and authentic content created an unexpected advantage in distinguishing historical fact from creative interpretation; second, combining accessible technologies with AI-assisted content generation can democratize the creation of engaging digital heritage experiences; and third, spatial relationships and narrative progression can effectively counter decontextualization concerns in digital heritage. The implementation points toward spatial augmented reality as a promising direction for future heritage interpretation, suggesting possibilities for deeper integration with physical spaces through interactive projections. This research contributes to ongoing discussions about democratizing heritage interpretation and demonstrates how thoughtful integration of emerging technologies can enhance rather than diminish authentic heritage experiences, while making industrial history more engaging for contemporary audiences.

This demo presents "Who Killed Helene Pumpulivaara?", an innovative interactive heritage experience that combines crime mystery narrative with XR technology to address key challenges in digital heritage interpretation. Our work makes six significant contributions: (1) the discovery of a "Historical Uncanny Valley" effect where varying fidelity levels between AI-generated and authentic content serve as implicit markers distinguishing fact from interpretation; (2) an accessible production pipeline combining mobile photography with AI tools that democratizes XR heritage creation for resource-limited institutions; (3) a spatial storytelling approach that effectively counters decontextualization in digital heritage; (4) a multi-platform implementation strategy across web and VR environments; (5) a practical model for AI-assisted heritage content creation balancing authenticity with engagement; and (6) a pathway toward spatial augmented reality for future heritage interpretation. Using the historic Finlayson Factory in Tampere, Finland as a case study, our implementation demonstrates how emerging technologies can enrich the authenticity of heritage experiences, fostering deeper emotional connections between visitors and the histories embedded in place.

Throughout human history, communication has evolved and diversified t hrough v arious m eans, f rom natural languages to modern forms like video and virtual reality. Now, a paradigm shift, transhumanism, is proposing the integration of machines and computers into the human body to augment individuals physically, sensorily, cognitively, and emotionally. In this pictorial, we examine “How can we approach the design of transhuman technologies for communication?” and “How might future research examine their impact on communication?” For this, we conducted co-speculation workshops to identify design opportunities, and based on them, created fictional a bstracts envisioning future research. Our work contributes a set of design speculations and a range of thought-provoking research ideas that will foster discussions about probable pitfalls and benefits of transhuman technologies in the future of communication.

The advancement of human-computer integration as a research field promises to introduce transhumanistic ways of communicating through the enhanced abilities of augmented humans. Our work seeks to illuminate this experiential landscape, exploring a diverse set of human augmentation technologies (HATs) for communication purposes. We investigated this topic through four co-speculation workshops focusing on physical, cognitive, sensory and emotional augmentations with 35 participants. Through a reflexive thematic analysis of the workshop data, we outlined eight HAT speculations for transhuman communication, grouped into four overarching augmentation clusters: (1) Bodily Changes in/for Communication, (2) Communication with Transferrable and Collective Beings, (3) Communication through Emotion and Memory, and (4) Communication with Augmented/Altered Perception. By serving as a foundation for discussions on transhumanism and communication in CSCW and beyond, these speculations contribute to a design space highlighting design opportunities and challenges to developing and researching near-future communication technologies.

Recent research calls for new design methods and tools that respond to the idiosyncrasies of emergent design spaces. Here we address one of them: the design of nature-related technology. To facilitate increasingly situated practices in this space, we created the Wild Probes: a set of probing tools for displacing co-design into the wilderness. Our toolkit enables forestry future-making by helping forest goers to pay attention to, reflect on, ideate around, and document their forestry experiences. Here we present the design and early use of the toolkit. We hope other designers will find it useful and extend it with new Wild Probes of their own.

Games have been used for utilitarian purposes since at least the 1960s, with gamification pursuing game-like experiences in areas such as education, health, and sustainability. While these methods generally attempt to improve life for players, a central and underexplored issue is the friction between a design that wants players to attain a utilitarian outcome, such as learning, and players who often strive for self-directed play. Based on data collected from user testing of a digital serious game and following an inductive process, we created a thematic framework that focuses on the frictions and tensions that may arise between design and player. This framework may be used to understand how players engage holistically with serious games, but also to improve such games to maximize engagement with the content while acknowledging and allowing for player agency and emergent behavior.

Due to the datafication of our society the necessity to increase data literacy is at an all time high. In this brief paper we present the design of the gamified application GANDALF, aiming to promote data literacy and used in experiment-based research. Following a methodology of research through design, we account for the different phases of the process and frame them as explorative and insightful epistemic stages. Such recount allow us some critical reflection over the design of GANDALF and to formulate five key design considerations that we hope will be useful in the future for the creation of software with similar purposes.

In this paper I reconstruct and outline some realisations of different forest ideologies, through the analysis of the digital adaptation of the boardgame ROOT - A Game of Woodland Might and Right. In particular, I use a semiotic square to map the different semantic fields and core strategies of the four different factions of the game, each featuring a different way to engage with forests. The analysis allows me to identify some key ideologies that, embedded in the game, reflect larger conceptualisations of the relationship between humans and woodlands. In the conclusion, the paper highlights how games, encompassing both a rule structure and a narrative layer, can offer a vantage point for the analysis of ideological constructions. Future research could apply similar methods to other games in an attempt to map the many ways in which forestry spaces, and our relations with them, are constructed.

Forests are, both culturally and ecologically, one of the most important environments on our planet. As such, there are countless representations of them - with Digital Games being no exception. In this paper we adopt the perspective of ecocriticism, which regards the analysis of the textual portrayal of physical environments of the natural world. In particular, we propose here a framework for the analysis of forest representations in digital games, mindful of the many different layers that coexist together: cultural, discursive, representational and ludic. In order to test our framework and to showcase its potential, in the last section we present a brief analysis of the slicing game Jack Lumber and of the ideological tensions that emerge from the game.

The current trends related to 'smart cities' are bringing the cityscapes of movies such as Blade Runner and Cyberpunk 2077 closer to our immediate reality. The question of what will the cities of the future look like is at the heart of urban studies. In parallel, a similar question is posed by (trans)humanists about the future of humanity and its possible technological enhancements. However, (trans)humanity and future cities are defined in a bi-directional dependency. Therefore, we have to answer the questions of future humans and cities simultaneously. This paper maps several ways of interacting between transhuman communities and smart cities to understand their possible effects on governing, design and society at large resulting in a framework that will work as a cautionary tale and an inspirational blueprint for imagining future urbanity.