ABSTRACT

Social virtual reality (VR) encompasses a growing network of three-dimensional virtual worlds where users interact in a shared, embodied way. While research has focused on the social interactions between the users themselves, less is known about how the design of virtual spaces influences these interactions. Our study combines interviews with 15 social VR users logging over 1,000 hours and a 20-hour spatial protocol of a purposeful sampling of VR worlds. We analysed how spatial characteristics (including proportion, sightlines, materiality, atmosphere, and navigation) influence meaningful user interaction to turn space into place. We synthesised four place types for a new social VR typology: Cuddle worlds that encourage cosy conversations; Mingle worlds that facilitate new encounters; Venture worlds that promote exploration; and Guided worlds that elicit a sense of belonging with the online community. By relating architectural affordances to social patterns, we contribute insights towards the purposeful design of social VR places.

Retail experiences in the Metaverse are becoming increasingly popular, driven by a business model that relies on brand engagement and user-generated virtual worlds (UGVWs).While much attention has been given to ideal design patterns for enhancing user engagement, there is a need for a critical examination of pain points that negatively impact their virtual product experiences.This study introduces anti-experiences as a methodological contribution, using speculative design to deliberately explore undesirable design elements and highlight engagement barriers in these virtual product experiences.Through group co-design and storyboarding, we conducted workshops with 30 participants using the Roblox platform as a case study, including XR designers, physical-world designers, and non-users of the Metaverse.Through this process, participants identified three key pain points: (1) missing diegetic elements, (2) fragmented social interactions, and (3) navigational ambiguity.By developing anti-design storyboards, participants critically examined how these pain points affect user engagement and satisfaction, uncovering potential risks and limitations of current Metaverse retail experiences.From these findings, we propose three key design insights to enhance virtual shopping environments: (1) Introducing play and balancing risk, (2) Shopping together between realities, (3) Orchestrating sensory richness and subtlety.

Cross-reality is an emerging research area concerned with systems operating across different points on the reality-virtuality continuum. These systems are often complex, involving multiple realities and users, and thus there is a need for an overarching design framework, which, despite growing interest has yet to be developed. This paper addresses this need by presenting eleven design patterns for cross-reality applications across the following four categories: fundamental, origin, display, and interaction patterns. To develop these design patterns we analysed a sample of 60 papers, with the goal of identifying recurring solutions. These patterns were then described in form of intent, solution, and application examples, accompanied by a diagram and archetypal example. This paper provides designers with a comprehensive set of patterns that they can use and draw inspiration from when creating cross-reality systems.

The metaverse is an immersive virtual realm that allows millions of users to interact with each other, both described by the social intricacies of the everyday and unrestrained by the physical limitations of reality. Yet despite the creative potential to disrupt how the built environment is represented, the metaverse tends to simulate the architectural conventions of physical reality. By visiting the virtual reality sites of 30 interiors, buildings, and plazas within popular metaverse platforms, we identified outliers in convention to curate a ‘Metaverse Design Catalogue’ of architectural features that were uncommon or unrealistic in physical reality. We thus challenged 21 architectural experts to use the catalogue as a catalyst to design an architecture that goes beyond convention to become ‘superarchitectural’. Based on their redesigned and reimagined floor plans and perspective drawings, we inform the design language of a superarchitectural metaverse through the dimensions of architectural diegesis, mutability, and asymmetry.

Thousands of people regularly meet, work and play in the architectural spaces that the metaverse offers today. Yet despite the creative potential to disrupt how the built environment is represented, there exists a prevalent belief that the architectural design of the metaverse is rather conventional and reliant on simulating physical reality. We investigated this claim by conducting a design critique study of the most apparent architectural design conventions within the current most popular metaverse platforms, as determined by a scoping review and Google Trends analysis. Based on the opinions of 21 architectural experts on the design of interiors, buildings, and plazas within these platforms, we elicited three overarching design conventions that capture the representation, engagement, and purpose of metaverse architecture. By discussing the impact of these conventions on architectural quality, we inform the future design of metaverse spaces to more purposefully, and perhaps less frequently, use realism to convey meaning.

The current state of Virtual Reality (VR) presents a limited and underwhelming user experience. Users are restricted from naturally walking beyond the physical boundaries of the real world, unable to fully explore large virtual environments. The virtual manifestation also often mirrors the physical features of the real world, neglecting the limitless possibilities of the virtual universe. In response to this limitation, this pictorial introduces Architectural Narrative VR, a generative environment that dynamically designs spaces on-the-fly. This approach enables users to roam freely within the constraints of their physical space, while the architectural proportions and rhythm of virtual spaces are designed to relate to external factors such as the sequential presentation of content and user behaviour. This work contributes to VR research by exploring new ways of generating virtual spaces that prioritise user-dependent rather than predefined manifestations of the architectural narrative, offering greater potential for immersive and multidimensional user experiences.

Media architecture exploits interactive technology to encourage passers-by to engage with an architectural environment. Whereas most media architecture installations focus on visual stimulation, we developed a permanent media facade that rhythmically knocks xylophone blocks embedded beneath 11 window sills, according to the human actions constantly traced via an overhead camera. In an attempt to overcome its apparent limitations in engaging passers-by more enduringly and purposefully, our study investigates the impact of feedforward learning, a constructive interaction method that instructs passers-by about the results of their actions. Based on a comparative (n=25) and a one-month in-the-wild (n=1877) study, we propose how feedforward learning could empower passers-by to understand the interaction of more abstract types of media architecture, and how particular quantitative indicators capturing this learning could predict how enduringly and purposefully a passer-might engage. We believe these contributions could inspire more creative integrations of non-visual modalities in future public interactive interventions.

Overt redirection is a class of virtual reality locomotion that uses perceptible transformations to enable the user to naturally walk through a virtual environment larger than the physical tracking space. In this research, we propose Foldable Spaces, a novel redirection approach based on the idea of dynamically ‘folding’ the geometry of the virtual environment to reveal new locations depending on the trajectory of the virtual reality user. Based on this approach, we developed three distinct techniques for overt redirection: (1) Horizontal, which folds and reveals layers of virtual space like the pages in a book; (2) Vertical, which rotates virtual space towards the user along a vertical axis; and (3) Accordion, which corrugates and flattens virtual space to bring faraway places closer to the user. In a within-subjects user study, we compared our proposed foldable techniques against each other along with a similarly situated redirection technique, Stop & Reset. Our findings show that Accordion was the most well-received by participants in terms of providing a smooth, continuous, and ‘natural’ experience of walking that does not involve shifts in orientation and provides an overarching view through the virtual environment.

Responsive architecture envisions the built environment to adapt to the changing needs of its occupants dynamically. Although it is increasingly feasible to move space-defining objects like room dividers by mobile robots, little is known about how or when such spatial adaptations should occur. We therefore measured the experience of 26 occupants while they performed six different activities inside an office breakout room that was being adapted by a robotically moving wall in either a reactive or proactive way. Based on these empirical findings, we propose how autonomous spatial adaptation should primarily aim to balance the spatial, situational and subjective qualities of the resulting sense of place. We also define eight distinct design recommendations that exploit the unique affordances of spatial adaptation. By asserting that future advances in human-building interaction (HBI) should be based on creating appropriate places rather than controlling functional spaces, we foresee how responsive architecture might become as compelling as its static counterpart.

When establishing a visual connection between a virtual reality user and an augmented reality user, it is important to consider whether the augmented reality user faces a surplus of information. Augmented reality, compared to virtual reality, involves two – not one – planes of information: the physical and the virtual. We propose SelectVisAR, a selective visualisation system of virtual environments in augmented reality. Our system enables an augmented reality spectator to perceive a co-located virtual reality user in the context of four distinct visualisation conditions: Interactive, Proximity, Everything, and Dollhouse. We explore an additional two conditions, Context and Spotlight, in a follow-up study. Our design uses a human-centric approach to information filtering, selectively visualising only parts of the virtual environment related to the interactive possibilities of a virtual reality user. The research investigates how selective visualisations can be helpful or trivial for the augmented reality user when observing a virtual reality user.