We present Anu.js, a toolkit for web-based immersive analytics (IA). The IA design space is vast, multi-faceted, and everchanging, challenging development in the absence of robust authoring support. The web is a popular platform for visualization applications, research, and teaching, and by leveraging the benefits of web technologies and adopting imperative authoring paradigms we can achieve the necessary expressiveness, compatibility, and ergonomics to support IA research and development. Anu.js adapts D3’s data-binding model to 3D contexts, granting fine-grained control over the creation, representation, animation, performance, and interaction of 3D scene-graphs. Additionally, Anu.js offers declarative prefabs to support common visualization elements and interactions, and synergizes with popular visualization libraries which allows developers to leverage these proven utilities. We demonstrate Anu.js’s potential through our diverse example gallery, expert evaluation, and potential future applications. Through this, Anu.js empowers developers in accelerating the creation of novel and bespoke visualizations for immersive web-based applications.

Workplace mentorship is critical for career advancement, sense of belonging, and well-being. However, historically marginalized groups face barriers to effective mentorship including misaligned commitments, difficulty establishing comfort with mentors, and relationship persistence. We explore how 3D virtual environment (VE) counterspaces, or spaces that center the well-being of marginalized people, can circumnavigate these barriers and generate dedicated environments for workplace mentorship. We present Mentorship Garden: a digital counterspace designed to facilitate mentorship communication around commitments, goals, progress, and well-being. We deployed Mentorship Garden with 10 mentor-mentee pairs, recruited from DEI mentoring programs at a large global company, and interviewed them about their experiences. Overall, Mentorship Garden provided a relaxing space for participants to engage in rituals supporting historically marginalized individuals via mentorship, but revealed potential challenges in seamlessly integrating it in the workplace. We discuss design implications for creating virtual mentorship counterspaces in the workplace and opportunities for future research.

Hybrid options at conferences, which support in-person and remote attendance, have increasingly become the norm in order to broaden participation and promote sustainability. However, hybrid conferences are challenging, where in-person and remote attendees often have disjoint, parallel experiences with limited opportunity to interact with each other. To explore the potential for facilitating social interaction between in-person and remote conference attendees, we designed and built SocialMiXR, a research prototype that uses WebXR technologies to align the physical and virtual worlds into one hybrid space for socialization. We deployed SocialMiXR in a three-day field study with 14 in-person and remote attendees of an engineering conference. Our qualitative results demonstrate that participants felt they were together in the same conference experience, and formed meaningful connections with each other. At the same time, they faced difficulties balancing different realities and capabilities given their separate contexts. We discuss implications for the design of hybrid social experiences at conferences.

Embodiment toward an avatar in virtual reality (VR) is generally stronger when there is a high degree of alignment between the user’s and self-avatar’s motion. However, one-to-one mapping between the two is not always ideal when user interacts with the virtual environment. On these occasions, the user input often leads to unnatural behavior without physical realism (e.g., objects penetrating virtual body, body unmoved by hitting stimuli). We investigate how adding physics correction to self-avatar motion impacts embodiment. Physics-aware self-avatar preserves the physical meaning of the movement but introduces discrepancies between the user’s and self-avatar’s motion, whose contingency is a determining factor for embodiment. To understand its impact, we conducted an in-lab study (n = 20) where participants interacted with obstacles on their upper bodies in VR with and without physics correction. Our results showed that, rather than compromising embodiment level, physics-responsive self-avatar improved embodiment compared to no-physics condition in both active and passive interactions.

We present VideoPoseVR, a video-based animation authoring workflow using online videos to author character animations in VR. It leverages the state-of-the-art deep learning approach to reconstruct 3D motions from online videos, caption the motions, and store them in a motion dataset. Creators can import the videos, search in the dataset, modify the motion timeline, and combine multiple motions from videos to author character animations in VR. We implemented a proof-of-concept prototype and conducted a user study to evaluate the feasibility of the video-based authoring approach as well as gather initial feedback of the prototype. The study results suggest that VideoPoseVR was easy to learn for novice users to author animations and enable rapid exploration of prototyping for applications such as entertainment, skills training, and crowd simulations.

In two studies, we investigate how users choose virtual backgrounds and how these backgrounds influence viewers' impressions. In Study 1, we created a web prototype allowing users to apply different virtual backgrounds to their camera views and asked users to select backgrounds that they believed would change viewers' perceptions of their personality traits. In Study 2, we then applied virtual backgrounds picked by participants in Study 1 to a subset of videos drawn from the First Impression Dataset. We then ran a series of three online experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to compare participants' personality trait ratings for subjects (1) with the selected virtual backgrounds, (2) with the original video backgrounds, and (3) with a gray screen as a background. The selected virtual backgrounds did not change the personality trait ratings in the intended direction. Instead, virtual background use of any kind results in a consistent "muting effect" that mitigates very high or low ratings (i.e., compressing ratings to the mean level) compared to the ratings of the video with the original background.

Recent advances in 3D reconstruction technology allow people to capture and share their experiences in 3D. However, little is known about people's sharing preferences and privacy concerns for these reconstructed experiences. To fill this gap, we first present ReliveReality, an experience-sharing method utilizing deep learning-based computer vision techniques to reconstruct clothed humans and 3D environments and estimate 3D pose with only a RGB camera. ReliveReality can be integrated into social virtual environments, allowing others to socially relive a shared experience by moving around the experience from different perspectives, on desktop or in VR. We conducted a 44-participant within-subject study to compare ReliveReality to viewing recorded videos, and to a ReliveReality version with blurring obfuscation. Our results shed light on how people identify with reconstructed avatars, how obfuscation affects reliving experiences, and sharing preferences and privacy concerns for reconstructed experiences. We propose design implications for addressing these issues.

To share a virtual reality (VR) experience remotely together, users usually record videos from an individual's point of view and then co-watch these videos. However, co-watching recorded videos limits users to reliving their memories from the perspective from which the video was captured. In this paper, we describe ReliveInVR, a new time-machine-like VR experience sharing method. ReliveInVR allows multiple users to immerse themselves in the relived experience together and independently view the experience from any perspective. We conducted a 1x3 within-subject study with 26 dyads to compare ReliveInVR with (1) co-watching 360-degree videos on desktop, and (2) co-watching 360-degree videos in VR. Our results suggest that participants reported higher levels of immersion and social presence in ReliveInVR. Participants in ReliveInVR also understood the shared experience better, discovered unnoticed things together and found the sharing experience more fulfilling. We discuss the design implications for sharing VR experiences over time and space.

Drones are becoming ubiquitous and offer support to people in various tasks, such as photography, in increasingly interactive social contexts. We introduce drone.io, a projected body-centric graphical user interface for human-drone interaction. Using two simple gestures, users can interact with a drone in a natural manner. drone.io is the first human-drone graphical user interface embedded on a drone to provide both input and output capabilities. This paper describes the design process of drone.io. We present a proof of concept, drone-based implementation, as well as a fully functional prototype for a drone tour-guide scenario. We report drone.io's evaluation in three user studies (N=27) and show that people were able to use the interface with little prior training. We contribute to the field of human-robot interaction and the growing field of human-drone interaction.

Distributed teams rely on asynchronous CMC tools to complete collaborative tasks due to the difficulties and costs surrounding scheduling synchronous communications. In this paper, we present VR-Replay, a new communication tool that records and replays avatars with both nonverbal behavior and verbal communication in VR asynchronous collaboration. We describe a study comparing VR-Replay with a desktop-based CVE with audio annotation and a VR immersive CVE with audio annotation. Our results suggest that viewing the replay avatar in VR-Replay improves teamwork, causing people to view their partners as more likable, warm, and friendly. 75% of the users chose VR-Replay as the preferred communication tool in our study.

We present a new type of sharing VR experience over distance which allows people to relive their recorded experience in VR together. We describe a pilot study examining the user experience when people share their VR experience together remotely. Finally, we discuss the implications for sharing VR experiences over time and space.