Effective self-reflection is crucial for motor skill acquisition, yet it is challenging to facilitate in single-user VR training environments. We investigate this through a method where users are embodied as a virtual trainer and prompted to actively evaluate a recorded performance. In an empirical study, we systematically varied the trainee’s appearance and their movements. Our mixed-methods analysis reveals that confronting one’s own performance triggers a fundamental role conflict between the user’s identity as the performer and their new role as the evaluator. Most importantly, this conflict challenges a binary view of embodiment. Participants experienced a multi-faceted sense of self, oscillating between identifying with the trainee and detaching as the trainer. Our work contributes a novel characterization of embodied self-evaluation, revealing a psychological duality at its core and offering clear design implications for VR systems that foster self-insight in training and therapy.

Technology increasingly shapes our social interactions, both online and in person. Strong social connections and face-to-face interactions are vital for wellbeing, especially with close relationships. In this context, technology can play an ambivalent role: whereas it often has a negative impact on the quality of these interactions, it carries potential to enrich conversations and improve social interactions if used in a meaningful way. We design a prototype that implements subtle intervention strategies to foster meaningful technology use, specifically aimed at enhancing close relationships during in-person interactions. We evaluate the prototype within an exploratory, two-week in-the-wild user study with 6 tandems ( N =12). Our findings suggest that the strategy of "us-reflection" – a social approach to reflection – contributes to mutual awareness of participants’ shared time. Our prototype encouraged more meaningful interactions by proposing conversation topics or suggesting activities, ultimately strengthening close relationships and fostering more intentional, engaging, and rewarding social experiences.

Recurrent negative thoughts can significantly disrupt daily life and contribute to negative emotional states. Facing, confronting, and noticing such thoughts without support can be challenging. To provide a playful setting and leverage the technical maturation of Virtual Reality (VR), our Virtual Reality (VR) experience, Mind Mansion, places the user in an initially cluttered virtual apartment. Here we utilize established concepts from traditional therapy and metaphors identified in prior works to let users engage metaphorically with representations of thoughts, gradually sorting the space, fostering awareness of thoughts, and supporting mental self-care. The results of our user study (n = 30) reveal that Mind Mansion encourages the exploration of alternative perspectives, fosters acceptance, and potentially offers new coping mechanisms. Our findings suggest that this Virtual Reality (VR) intervention can reduce negative affect and improve overall emotional awareness.

Social interaction is a crucial part of what it means to be human. Maintaining a healthy social life is strongly tied to positive outcomes for both physical and mental health. While we use personal informatics data to reflect on many aspects of our lives, technology-supported reflection for social interactions is currently under-explored. To address this, we first conducted an online survey (N=124) to understand how users want to be supported in their social interactions. Based on this, we designed and developed an app for users to track and reflect on their social interactions and deployed it in the wild for two weeks (N=25). Our results show that users are interested in tracking meaningful in-person interactions that are currently untraced and that an app can effectively support self-reflection on social interaction frequency and social load. We contribute insights and concrete design recommendations for technology-supported reflection for social interaction.

Gaze-aware interfaces should work on all display sizes. This paper researches whether angular velocity or tangential speed should be kept when scaling a gaze-aware interface based on circular smooth pursuits to another display size. We also address the question of which target speed and which trajectory size feels most comfortable for the users. We present the results of a user study where the participants were asked how they perceived the speed and the radius of a circular moving smooth pursuit target. The data show that the users’ judgment of the optimal speed corresponds with an optimal detection rate. The results also enable us to give an optimal value pair for target speed and trajectory radius. Additionally, we give a functional relation on how to adapt the target speed when scaling the geometry to keep optimal detection rate and user experience.