Stress and poor sleep remain pervasive challenges in modern life, yet traditional relaxation practices such as pranayama (breathing exercises) require guidance, discipline, and environments that are often difficult to sustain. VR–based relaxation tools have emerged as alternatives, but their abrupt immersion into fully virtual environments can feel disruptive and misaligned with the gradual nature of meditative practices. To address this gap, we collaborated with pranayama practitioners in a co-design process to develop Zenflow, an MR system that blends subtle visuals and breathing cues to gradually transform the user’s surroundings into a restorative virtual space. We evaluated the system in a 3 week within-subjects study (N=12), comparing traditional Pranayama with two variations of Zenflow. Results show that Zenflow transition design significantly improved self-reported sleep quality and objective measures of stress and sleep. Our work contributes design insights and evidence that gradual environmental transition can improve MR systems for stress management.

To support seamless mixed reality (MR) interactions without obstructing natural touch, we introduce PhantomFolds, a nail-mounted device featuring two linear resonant actuators (LRAs) at the lateral nail folds that provide spatio-tactile feedback for in-air as well as on-surface interactions in MR. In three studies, we investigate the perception of spatio-tactile feedback produced by PhantomFolds. Our results show that (1) PhantomFolds can leverage the funneling illusion to produce spatio-tactile feedback at the finger for in-air as well as on-surface interactions, (2) tactile feedback produced with PhantomFolds can successfully increase the perceived realism in MR applications without impeding user interaction, (3) phantom sensations, are perceived more localized when users touch a surface, and (4) while participants could not consistently feel touch illusions below the finger when touching a surface as described by prior work, our results indicate that a per-user calibration could increase the success rate of this effect in the future.

People with a fear of being in water rarely engage in water activities and hence miss out on the associated health benefits. Prior research suggested virtual exposure to treat fears. However, when it comes to a fear of being in water, virtual water might not capture water’s immersive qualities, while real water can pose safety risks. We propose extended reality to combine both advantages: We conducted a study (N=12) where participants with a fear of being in water interacted with playful water-inspired virtual reality worlds while floating inside a floatation tank. Our findings, supported quantitatively by heart rate variability and qualitatively by interviews, suggest that playful extended reality could mitigate fear responses in an entertaining way. We also present insights for the design of future systems that aim to help people with a fear of being in water and other phobias by using the best of the virtual and physical worlds.

In collaborative settings where multiple individuals are tasked with completing a shared goal, understanding one’s partner’s emotional state could be crucial for achieving a successful outcome. This is particularly relevant in remote collaboration contexts, where physical distance can impede understanding, empathy, and mutual comprehension between partners. In this paper, we demonstrate representing emotional patterns from physiological data in a shared Virtual Reality (VR) environment, and explore how it impacted communication styles. A user study investigated the potential effects of this emotional representation in fostering empathetic communication during remote collaboration. The study’s findings revealed that although there was minimal variance in the workload associated with observing physiological cues, participants generally preferred monitoring their partner’s attentional state. However, with the assembly task chosen, most participants only directed a minimal proportion of their attention toward the physiological cues displayed by their partner, and were frequently uncertain of how to interpret and use the information obtained. We also discuss limitations of the research and opportunities for future work.

Researchers have used machine learning approaches to identify motion sickness in VR experience. These approaches would certainly benefit from an accurately labeled, real-world, diverse dataset that enables the development of generalizable ML models. We introduce 'VR.net', a dataset comprising 165-hour gameplay videos from 100 real-world games spanning ten diverse genres, evaluated by 500 participants. VR.net accurately assigns 24 motion sickness-related labels for each video frame, such as camera/object movement, depth of field, and motion flow. Building such a dataset is challenging since manual labeling would require an infeasible amount of time. Instead, we implement a tool to automatically and precisely extract ground truth data from 3D engines' rendering pipelines without accessing VR games' source code. We illustrate the utility of VR.net through several applications, such as risk factor detection and sickness level prediction. We believe that the scale, accuracy, and diversity of VR.net can offer unparalleled opportunities for VR motion sickness research and beyond.We also provide access to our data collection tool, enabling researchers to contribute to the expansion of VR.net.

Supporting natural communication cues is critical for people to work together remotely and face-to-face. In this paper we present a Mixed Reality (MR) remote collaboration system that enables a local worker to share a live 3D panorama of his/her surroundings with a remote expert. The remote expert can also share task instructions back to the local worker using visual cues in addition to verbal communication. We conducted a user study to investigate how sharing augmented gaze and gesture cues from the remote expert to the local worker could affect the overall collaboration performance and user experience. We found that by combing gaze and gesture cues, our remote collaboration system could provide a significantly stronger sense of co-presence for both the local and remote users than using the gaze cue alone. The combined cues were also rated significantly higher than the gaze in terms of ease of conveying spatial actions.