Urban development reduces green space, disrupts wildlife, and increases noise, diminishing everyday exposure to natural soundscapes and weakening people’s connection to nearby nature. We explore restoring urban natural soundscapes with personal Audio AR to help people reacquaint with everyday nature, and observe associations with perceived nature connectedness, eco-awareness (noticing both existing and missing greenery), and reflection. We present GreenAR, a ubiquitous location-aware system that composes spatial, visually-congruent biophony (birds, insects) from OpenStreetMap greenery around the listener. We conducted three in-situ studies: (1) an error-resilient sound placement evaluation under urban GPS conditions (n=16); (2) a campus study comparing with/without restoration (day/night) (n=16); and (3) a week-long field deployment in five countries (n=12). Participants reported higher nature connectedness with restoration, heightened awareness of vegetation and urban wildlife, attention to green deficits along routes, and occasional micro‑actions. Notably, one participant described a reversal from opposing to supporting urban greening policies, highlighting the potential of everyday ambient soundscapes to shape reflection on urban nature.

Research has shown that walking during meetings improves creativity, memory, attention, health, and happiness. While mobile technologies have freed users from having to be stationary during virtual meetings, mobile phones pose several usability challenges, such as reduced productivity due to small screens and safety concerns. In this paper, we present the first exploration of augmented reality (AR) interface design for virtual meetings in real-world walking conditions. We conducted design sessions in-situ with 16 user interface and AR designers using a 2x2 experimental design: meeting while walking in two levels of traffic conditions and with two types of meeting formats. Results show that the designed AR windows averaged 14.5 times in viewing size compared to the most popular smartphone screens. Also, Traffic Level significantly affected the size, opacity, and placement of windows, as well as the preference of anchoring modes, while Meeting Format significantly affected size and opacity. Furthermore, clustering analysis identified two groups of designs that can serve as initial reference designs for further customization and research.

This paper explores the feasibility of deliberately designing VR motion that diverges from users’ physical movements to turn mundane, everyday transportation motion (e.g., metros, trains, and cars) into more entertaining VR motion experiences, in contrast to prior car-based VR approaches that synchronize VR motion to physical car movement exactly. To gain insight into users’ preferences for veering rate and veering direction for turning (left/right) and pitching (up/down) during the three phases of acceleration (accelerating, cruising, and decelerating), we conducted a formative, perceptual study (n=24) followed by a VR experience evaluation (n=18), all conducted on metro trains moving in a mundane, straight-line motion. Results showed that participants preferred relatively high veering rates, and preferred pitching upward during acceleration and downward during deceleration. Furthermore, while veering decreased comfort as expected, it significantly enhanced immersion (p<.01) and entertainment (p<.001) and the overall experience, with comfort being considered, was preferred by 89% of participants.

Mobile phones have enabled users to browse information in varying mobility contexts. For high-mobility settings such as walking, however, phones pose several usability challenges, particularly safety and limited screen sizes. While Augmented Reality (AR) has been proposed to address these issues, prior work has yet to investigate AR interface design in real-world walking conditions beyond text readability and notification design. This paper presents the first exploration of AR browsing interface design and extended usage while walking in the wild. We first conducted design sessions with 12 UI designers while walking in varied environments to design the window size, distance, opacity, anchor type, and placement for three categories of apps: text, video, and mixed content. Results show that traffic level significantly affects the designed window size, whereas content type significantly affects window size, distance, opacity, and vertical placement. To gain further insights from real-world usage, we conducted a multi-day observational study with 5 participants and observed that participants on average switched among window layouts every 3.3 minutes, for reasons such as safety and the level of extended visual attention.