In pre-production, filmmakers and 3D animation experts must rapidly prototype ideas to explore a film’s possibilities before full-scale production, yet conventional approaches involve trade-offs in efficiency and expressiveness. Hand-drawn storyboards often lack spatial precision needed for complex cinematography, while 3D previsualization demands expertise and high-quality rigged assets. To address this gap, we present PrevizWhiz, a system that leverages rough 3D scenes in combination with generative image and video models to create stylized video previews. The workflow integrates frame-level image restyling with adjustable resemblance, time-based editing through motion paths or external video inputs, and refinement into high-fidelity video clips. A study with filmmakers demonstrates that our system lowers technical barriers for film-makers, accelerates creative iteration, and effectively bridges the communication gap, while also surfacing challenges of continuity, authorship, and ethical consideration in AI-assisted filmmaking.

Virtual Reality (VR) offers portable and flexible workspaces. However, enabling efficient and comfortable interactions without external input devices remains challenging. We propose leveraging redirected input to enable comfortable and touch-like interaction for quick and intuitive control. Our design study revealed that while touch interaction performs well with direct input, its performance degrades significantly under input redirection. In contrast, using pinch improves redirected input by providing self-haptic feedback and reducing input dimensionality, thereby compensating for spatial discrepancies. Based on these findings, we introduce Redirected Pinch, a bare-hand interaction technique that combines input redirection with pinch confirmation. It creates a virtual plane at waist height, remapping hand movements on the plane to a vertical window, with pinch gestures used for confirmation. A user study demonstrated that Redirected Pinch achieves a strong balance of accuracy, efficiency, comfort, and sense of agency across fundamental interactions.

Live streaming has become increasingly popular, driven by the desire for direct and real-time interactions between streamers and viewers. However, current text-based interactions and pre-defined emojis limit expressiveness, especially when referring to specific stream moments. We propose ThingMoji, a type of user-captured cut-outs to enhance user expression and foster more effective communication between streamers and their audience in the comment section. ThingMojis are unique digital icons created by users by capturing snapshots and annotating specific areas at any point during the stream. We developed StreamThing, a live-streaming platform integrated with ThingMojis, to explore their use during object-focused live streaming contexts. In a user study with three in-the-wild deployments reveals the expressive use of ThingMojis in diverse live-streaming scenarios with rich visual contents. Our findings show that ThingMojis enable viewers to reference specific objects, express emotions, and create shared visual narratives. Streamers found ThingMojis valuable for facilitating on-the-fly communication around visual content and fostering playful interactions. The study also uncovered challenges in ThingMoji comprehension, issues for long-term uses of ThingMojis, and potential concerns regarding misuse. Based on these insights, we discussed new opportunities for supporting object-focused communication during live streaming environments.

Turn-taking is one of the biggest interactivity challenges in multiparty remote meetings. One contributing factor is that current videoconferencing tools lack support for proxemic cues; i.e., spatial cues that humans use to enact their social relations and intentions. While more recent tools provide support for proxemic metaphors, they often focus on approach and leave-taking rather than turn-taking. In this paper, we present OpenMic, a videoconferencing system that utilizes proxemic metaphors for conversational floor management by providing 1) a Virtual Floor that serves as a fixed-feature space for users to be aware of others’ intention to talk, and 2) Malleable Mirrors, which are video and screen feeds that can be continuously moved and resized for conversational floor transitions. Our exploratory user study found that these system features can aid the conversational flow in multiparty video meetings. With this work, we show potential for embedding proxemic metaphors to support conversational floor management in videoconferencing systems.

In video meetings, individuals may wish to share various physical objects with remote participants, such as physical documents, design prototypes, and personal belongings. However, our formative study discovered that this poses several challenges, including difficulties in referencing a remote user’s physical objects, the limited visibility of the object, and the friction of properly framing and orienting an object to the camera. To address these challenges, we propose ThingShare, a video-conferencing system designed to facilitate the sharing of physical objects during remote meetings. With ThingShare, users can quickly create digital copies of physical objects in the video feeds, which can then be magnified on a separate panel for focused viewing, overlaid on the user’s video feed for sharing in context, and stored in the object drawer for reviews. Our user study demonstrated that ThingShare made initiating object-centric conversations more efficient and provided a more stable and comprehensive view of shared objects.

People often form small conversation groups during physical gatherings to have ad-hoc and informal conversations. As these groups are loosely defined, others can often overhear and join the conversation. However, current video-conferencing tools only allow for strict boundaries between small conversation groups, inhibiting fluid group formations and between-group conversations. This isolates small-group conversations from others and leads to inefficient transitions between conversations. We present FluidMeet, a virtual breakout meeting system that employs flexible conversation boundaries and cross-group conversation visualizations to enable fluid conversation group formations and ad-hoc, informal conversations. FluidMeet enables out-group members to overhear group conversations while allowing conversation groups to control their shared level of context. Users within conversation groups can also quickly switch between in-group and private conversations. A study of FluidMeet showed that it encouraged users to break group boundaries, made them feel less isolated in group conversations, and facilitated communication across different groups.