This full-day studio investigates how tangible and soft interfaces can serve as cognitive companions in virtual environments. Rather than optimizing usability or learning outcomes, the workshop explores how perception itself can become a material for reflection and thought. Participants will design and test multisensory interfaces—airflow, heat, softness, and scent-diffusion elements—integrated into a VR escape-room framework. These sensory interventions aim not to enhance performance but to reveal the reciprocity between body and cognition. By treating VR as an embodied instrument rather than a display, Perception VR Studio invites participants to examine how airflow, temperature, and scent modulate attention, emotion, and reflective learning. The goal is to prototype new forms of perceptual scaffolding that make cognition tangible—something one can sense, breathe, and feel.

This in-person studio explores how mixed reality (MR) and biometrics can make intangible emotional states tangible through embodied art practices. We begin with two well-established modalities, clay sculpting and free-form 2D drawing, to ground participants in somatic awareness and manual, reflective expression. Building on this baseline, we introduce an MR prototype that maps physiological signals (e.g., breath, heart rate variability, eye movement dynamics) to visual and spatial parameters (color saturation, pulsing, motion qualities), generating ”3D emotional artifacts.” The full-day program balances theory (somatic psychology, embodied cognition, expressive biosignals), hands-on making, and comparative reflection to interrogate what analog and digital modalities respectively afford for awareness, expression, and meaning-making. Participants will (1) experience and compare analog and MR-based journaling of emotion; (2) prototype and critique mappings from biosignals to visual/spatial feedback; and (3) articulate design principles for trauma-informed, hybrid workflows that amplify interoceptive literacy without overwhelming the user. The expected contributions include a shared design vocabulary for biometric expressivity, a set of generative constraints for future TEI work on emotional archiving, and actionable insights into when automated translation supports or hinders embodied connection.

Adaptive Virtual Reality (VR) systems have the potential to enhance training and learning experiences by dynamically responding to users' cognitive states.This research investigates how eye tracking and heart rate variability (HRV) can be used to detect cognitive load and stress in VR environments, enabling real-time adaptation.The study follows a three-phase approach: (1) conducting a user study with the Stroop task to label cognitive load data and train machine learning models to detect high cognitive load, (2) fine-tuning these models with new users and integrating them into an adaptive VR system that dynamically adjusts training difficulty based on physiological signals, and (3) developing a privacy-aware approach to detect high cognitive load and compare this with the adaptive VR in Phase two.This research contributes to affective computing and adaptive VR using physiological sensing, with applications in education, training, and healthcare.Future work will explore scalability, real-time inference optimization, and ethical considerations in physiological adaptive VR.

Assessing speech disorders in early childhood is challenging, and Speech-Language Pathologists (SLPs) play a key role in addressing such a challenge. However, tools that support speech assessment are often not child-friendly, and SLPs struggle to keep young patients engaged. To compensate, we introduce ArticuMotion, a child-friendly app that supports the assessment of speech disorders while engaging children in gamified experiences. We use participatory design to co-create ArticuMotion with SLPs and test the resulting product in a user study with nine preschool children. ArticuMotion has promise as a gamified assessment for motor speech disorders and shows a potential avenue for designing clinical tools that are useful while being child-friendly.

Researchers and designers have considered how gamification can make education more effective. In this paper, the role of player-character relationships is considered. Designers can use various factors to get users attached to their character, including the feeling of responsibility. In this paper, we investigate whether feeling responsible for one’s in-game character improved the efficacy of a gamified educational experience. An educational, gamified story called Humanatees was designed to incite the protégé effect to see if participants learned more when they felt responsible for their character. The results suggest that participants in the experimental condition achieved significantly higher learning gains, providing evidence for the protégé effect. However, how this effect is established is more complex than feeling responsible. Future work should shed more light on the dynamics behind the protégé effect.