Virtual reality (VR) in museum exhibitions often centers on the person using a head-mounted display (HMD), overlooking the experience of co-located visitors. We conducted a user study with 25 participants, using a prototype museum exhibit featuring VR content, one HMD, a tangible controller, and a public display. Our findings identified four user roles: HMD User, Guide, Observer, and Avoidant Participant, shaped by the design, usability, and social context. Guides emerged to assist others, partly compensating for the usability and lack of embedded instructions. Observer and Avoidant roles revealed missed opportunities for interaction. Our findings highlight the value of designing for asymmetric participation to support varied and inclusive engagement in group settings with VR in museum settings, and we present design implications to better support this.

We investigate the integration of embodied agents within the automotive environment to enhance driver guidance. We explore the concept through two user studies. Through a gesture elicitation study using motion capture technology, we first identified a set of whole-body gestures suitable for in-car driver assistance. We then recreated the selected gestures by acting them out and recording them as animations. The selected gestures were then evaluated and mapped to different driving-related scenarios in the second study conducted in a simulated in-car condition. The most promising gestures for an embodied in-car driving assistant were pointing towards a certain direction, showing warning signs by crossing the arms either on the chest or arms on top of the head, and performing waving gestures to alert or to grasp the driver’s attention. By charting the potential signaling gestures, we aim to advance the development of more intuitive in-car guidance systems, ultimately promoting road safety.

Figure 1: An inaccessible graveyard (left), virtually modelled (center), and visited using a custom interface designed for a museum setting (right).

Robots' abilities to communicate with humans are often limited, missing expressive power and non-verbal communication cues.We present a concept design and a wizard-of-Oz prototype of a wearable emoji display, which aims to provide additional communication cues to communicate the robot's intent and provide means for a more affective communication towards a human.We explore the concept of an emoji necklace with a robot dog, which has more limitations in expressing its intent compared to a humanoid robot design.The concept was evaluated in a user study with ten participants.The salient findings indicate that the robot dog's intentions were perceived as easier to interpret with the wearable emoji display, especially when displaying clear emojis matching the robot's movements.

Wearable displays can be helpful in the winter outdoors, where using a mobile phone is difficult due to gloves. In this paper, we explore the concept of integrating a graphical navigator display into a skiing glove. We created a prototype that was trialed on the slopes while snowboarding. After this, we organized a focus group with snowboarders and downhill skiers to evaluate the concept and wearable display use cases in the winter mountain context. The results emphasize use cases that focus on the awareness of group members for safety, navigation, and unobtrusive and simple design.