Emotional harm and discomfort in therapeutic extended realities (XR) remains underexamined, even as immersive tools are increasingly deployed in healthcare contexts. We frame therapeutic XR as EmotionTech and reflect on 12 cases from 9 researchers and designers through interviews and workshops. We locate four concerns for emotional harm and identify ways to address them: how to talk about emotion, when to talk about emotion, whose emotions are centred, and which emotions are valued. Building on these themes and therapeutic XR as one form of EmotionTech, we propose strategies to legitimise concerns for emotional safety in design and research practice, legitimise knowers by recognising diverse perspectives and situated experiences, and leveraging ambiguity in design and training tools that foster reflexivity rather than closure. These strategies together reposition design responsibility in EmotionTech innovation and make visible its potential to cause emotional discomforts and harms.

Mental health chatbots are increasingly deployed as scalable interventions, yet the relational mechanisms underpinning their effectiveness remain unclear. Drawing on prior research on digital therapeutic alliance, we operationalized a preliminary multi-dimensional instrument to capture perceptions of relational and functional dynamics in mental health chatbot interactions and conducted a four-week within-subjects study with 56 participants engaging with Wysa and Youper (two widely used CBT-based mental health chatbots). Through iterative factor refinement and regression modeling, we found that user-chatbot relationship formation is primarily driven by two factors: an affective factor, centered on emotional support, and a goal-oriented factor, centered on practical assistance. Conversational control contributed alongside these interpersonal factors, while trust (privacy, non-judgmentalness) and satisfaction emerged as correlated outcomes of supportive, effective interactions rather than standalone predictors. These findings advance models of the Digital Therapeutic Alliance by clarifying its underlying structure and highlighting design priorities for balancing empathy and efficacy in conversational agents.

As our most advanced technologies, such as AI, become both infrastructural and opaque, experts must educate and engage the broader public.To that end, we developed an Augmented Reality * (AR) museum installation about facial recognition and data collection that served both as a medium of public education and as a platform for collecting multiple different kinds of data-though, notably, not facial or other biometric data-from more than 100,000 museum visitors.We explain our design process through four animating tensions: comfort/discomfort, simplicity/complexity, neutrality/critique, and the individual/communal.Using thematic analysis of interviews and surveys, we draw insights on how people exposed to problematic technologies in a 'safe space' such as a museum make sense of these issues: with levity and resignation but also reverence, often specifically rooted in local cultures.We conclude with implications of the guiding principle derived from this work: "using problematic technology to teach about problematic technology."

Email is ubiquitous, and in the context of phishing, it becomes critical, as risky behaviours like clicking on phishing links or downloading malicious files can lead to severe consequences.While much research exists on phishing susceptibility, there is still a gap in understanding factors that influence user micro-behaviour when interacting with phishing emails.To address this, we offer a tool, the Precision Email Simulator, to support phishing researchers, as well as considerations in conceptualising controlled 'experimental simulation' studies, which are currently underutilised in phishing research.The Precision Email Simulator simulates real-world email inboxes and tracks precision user data, such as time spent on messages and eye-tracking for key areas like URLs and sender addresses.We discuss the practical uses of our simulator, and provide recommendations and guidelines of using our email simulator. CCS Concepts• Security and privacy → Phishing

Software applications, while being an integral part of the modern world, pose significant threats to end-user privacy. Thus, computer professionals require knowledge and skills to develop privacy-aware software. However, undergraduate computing degree programs often lack privacy-focused curricula that can cultivate this ability in the future workforce. Therefore, we designed a privacy curriculum informed by the common challenges that computing professionals face when developing privacy-embedded software. It guides students in realising the need for privacy, identifying privacy protection mechanisms and programming Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs). We piloted the curriculum for third-year Computer Science undergraduates at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. The curriculum was evaluated using course assessments and surveys conducted before and after the lessons. Overall, the students improved their understanding of privacy, especially technical aspects. Most of them valued the applied learning experience of the programming lessons yet showed distinct views on task completion difficulty and motivation to do programming. Students recognised that privacy should be integral to their skill set by confirming the importance and relevance of the lessons. However, their perceived responsibility in privacy protection varied depending on their intention to take proactive measures. Based on the results, the paper suggests improvements to the proposed curriculum.

Our most cutting-edge virtual reality remains focused on visual perception over embodiment. This article presents a dance performance project that stems from a foundation in somatics, creative dance, and HCI to embrace the challenge of centering bodies and embodiment within virtual reality. Our team of choreographers, dancers, and technologists recount the two-year development of the 360 video through ideation, movement tracking workshops, prototyping, process share-outs, to a final performance, to reflect on how our goal to centre bodies guided our artistic and technology choices throughout the entire process of making. Space became a key theme as we refined the choreography and design to use the full potentialities of the immersive environment. Place became a key theme as we prioritised configurations that enabled the performance to be showcased in the Pacific, Eastern Europe and Latin America. We discuss challenges and opportunities for supporting embodiment in virtual reality dance performance.

We introduce RadarHand, a wrist-worn wearable with millimetre wave radar that detects on-skin touch-based proprioceptive hand gestures. Radars are robust, private, small, penetrate materials, and require low computation costs. We first evaluated the proprioceptive and tactile perception nature of the back of the hand and found that tapping on the thumb is the least proprioceptive error of all the finger joints, followed by the index finger, middle finger, ring finger, and pinky finger in the eyes-free and high cognitive load situation. Next, we trained deep-learning models for gesture classification. We introduce two types of gestures based on the locations of the back of the hand: generic gestures and discrete gestures. Discrete gestures are gestures that start at specific locations and end at specific locations at the back of the hand, in contrast to generic gestures, which can start anywhere and end anywhere on the back of the hand. Out of 27 gesture group possibilities, we achieved 92% accuracy for a set of seven gestures and 93% accuracy for the set of eight discrete gestures. Finally, we evaluated RadarHand’s performance in real-time under two interaction modes: Active interaction and Reactive interaction. Active interaction is where the user initiates input to achieve the desired output, and reactive interaction is where the device initiates interaction and requires the user to react. We obtained an accuracy of 87% and 74% for active generic and discrete gestures, respectively, as well as 91% and 81.7% for reactive generic and discrete gestures, respectively. We discuss the implications of RadarHand for gesture recognition and directions for future works.

Phishing is recognized as a serious threat to organizations and individuals. While there have been significant technical advances in blocking phishing attacks, end-users remain the last line of defence after phishing emails reach their email inboxes. Most of the existing literature on this subject has focused on the technical aspects related to phishing. The factors that cause humans to be susceptible to phishing attacks are still not well-understood. To fill this gap, we reviewed the available literature and systematically categorized the phishing susceptibility variables studied. We classify variables based on their temporal scope, which led us to propose a three-stage Phishing Susceptibility Model (PSM) for explaining how humans are vulnerable to phishing attacks. This model reveals several research gaps that need to be addressed to understand and improve protection against phishing susceptibility. Our review also systematizes existing studies by their sample size and generalizability and further suggests a practical impact assessment of the value of studying variables: Some more easily lead to improvements than others. We believe that this article can provide guidelines for future phishing susceptibility research to improve experiment design and the quality of findings.

There are decades of work investigating how to support users in inhabiting avatars’ bodies in immersive experiences, however we are still learning about how Virtual Reality (VR) can support people in more deeply inhabiting their own bodies. Over the course of five action research workshops, we explored the design space for how VR can support feeling embodied and generating movement within a dance context. We explored design factors and participants’ experiences within: games intended to stimulate physical movement, single player and multiplayer 3D painting, 360 live video, and custom real-time audio and visual feedback based on motion capture. We found that participants spontaneously explored collaboration including synchronous, asynchronous, remote and collocated. Where there were mismatches between visual and kinesthetic perceptions, participants explored how to recalibrate, alternate between, and integrate perceptions. Participants were compelled to explore their control of real-time effects, which led to rich movement generation as we iterated through the effects’ parameters. We present a design space that encapsulates the insights of our action research, with axes for control, collaboration, auditory and visual feedback. We discuss implications for the support of immersive embodiment in dance.

Scholars, journalists, and other commentators argue that many parts of the world, including the US, are suffering a social-epistemological crisis, sometimes called "post-truth," and that this crisis is related to the fragmentation of newsmedia. The conventional media effects research explanation for this relationship between news and "post-truth" is framed in terms of messages and information-especially misinformation-as the mechanism by which communication effects change. Analysing the results of a large (n = 164) interview study on mobile and other digital news audiencehood, this article presents an alternative, complementary explanation focused on ritual functions of communication. The primary method of affinity analysis of interview data identified a number of recurring themes: people's preferences, methods, and patterns of news consumption exhibit wild diversity beyond easy summary, but they share the experience of news as nearly ubiquitous, and often as excessive and therefore in need of management. Strategies for managing news broadly fell into categories of news avoidance and active research. Perhaps the most consistent observation across participants' accounts, however, is a conspicuous absence of other people, with news managed and confronted alone. Those findings are interpreted through James Carey's ritual theory of communication, which argues that meaning emerges not only through transmission of messages and information, but also through people's shared experiences of participating in the ritual processes of communication. This work makes a parallel argument that media fragmentation has been implicated in social-epistemological breakdown not only through the mechanism of messages and (mis)information, but also through the transformation and, in certain cases, loss of shared news rituals. The combination of large-scale interview research with media ritual analysis led to these insights about the cultural relevance and collective implications of people's experiences of ubiquitous news and the avoidance thereof.

This research aimed to investigate how children with autism interacted with rich audio and visual augmented reality (AR) tabletop games. Based on in-depth needs analysis facilitated through autism centers in China, we designed and developed MagicBLOCKS, a series of tabletop AR interactive games for children with autism. We conducted a four-week field study with 15 male children. We found that the interactive dynamics in games were rewarding and played critical roles in motivation and sustained interest. In addition, based on post-hoc interviews and video analysis with expert therapists, we found that MagicBLOCKS provided opportunities for children with autism to engage with each other through player performances and audience interactions with episodes of cooperation and territoriality. We discuss the limitations and the insights offered by this research.

Gamification has been used in introductory programming courses, for example, to increase engagement with study materials, reduce procrastination, and increase attendance to practice sessions. Indeed, with the rapidly growing adoption of digital tools in such courses, the use of various game elements and mechanics to drive participation is increasing. Previous studies on gamification in computing have examined the effects over the whole student population. Prior work in other disciplines has found that the benefits associated with gamification may only be realized for some students, while others may even experience reduced motivation. The Hexad user types survey attempts to tackle this problem by grouping users into six different types for whom gamification should have different effects. The goal is to personalize the game elements for different user types, thus creating gamified experiences more suitable for individual learners. In this work, we study whether the Hexad survey could be used to guide the personalization of gamification in an introductory programming course. Specifically, we examine the quality of students' answers to the Hexad survey and explore whether they can be used to predict students' preferences for enabling gamification in the platform where they complete assignments. In our specific computing education context, we find that classifying students using the Hexad survey does not appear to be an effective approach for the automatic personalization of gamification.

A common practice in HCI research is to conduct a survey to understand the generalizability of findings from smaller-scale qualitative research. These surveys are typically deployed to convenience samples, on low-cost platforms such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk or Survey Monkey, or to more expensive market research panels offered by a variety of premium firms. Costs can vary widely, from hundreds of dollars to tens of thousands of dollars depending on the platform used. We set out to understand the accuracy of ten different survey platforms/panels compared to ground truth data for a total of 6,007 respondents on 80 different aspects of demographic and behavioral questions. We found several panels that performed significantly better than others on certain topics, while different panels provided longer and more relevant open-ended responses. Based on this data, we highlight the benefits and pitfalls of using a variety of survey distribution options in terms of the quality, efficiency, and representative nature of the respondents and the types of responses that can be obtained.

Virtual Reality (VR) systems have become an affordable mass market technology, along with 3D building design tools such as Building Information Modelling (BIM). This provides architects, designers and their clients with immersive experiences of evolving building designs. VR systems typically require physical controllers to manage 3D navigation and to invoke other functions within the virtual environment. A range of mid-air, contactless gesture detecting technologies exist which offer the potential of more intuitive interactions between a user and the 3D model they are experiencing. This research elicited a mid-air hand gesture set for 3D building navigation from interviews with architects and other design professionals. The gestures proposed by design professionals were evaluated against known usability factors to determine an initial set of gestures which were tested through a VR navigation task. An evaluation study was performed looking at the memorability, intuitiveness and comfort of the gestures. The data from this study suggests that the developed gesture set is effective.

Despite claims of Mobile TV's mainstream arrival in 2010, it took until 2017 for watching professionally-produced television content on mobile phones to truly become a mass-market phenomenon in America, with half of all TV content expected to be watched on mobile phones by 2020. But what professionally produced content are people watching on their phones and when are they watching it? Are there any clusters of behavior that emerge in the broader population when it comes to watching TV on the phone? We set out to answer these questions through two surveys deployed to representative samples of online Americans. We discuss our findings on the mass-market arrival of mobile TV viewing and differences from how the HCI community has previously envisioned mobile video. We conclude with implications for the design of future mobile TV systems.

Social media platforms offer people a variety of ways to interact, ranging from public broadcast posts, to comments on posts, to private messages, to paralinguistic interactions such as "liking" posts. In 2015, the commenting function "replies" was temporarily removed from Tumblr, providing a unique opportunity to study the deprivation of a standard social media feature. We administered a survey to investigate Tumblr users' perceptions and use of replies. Respondents reported that they used replies to simultaneously support others' performance and their own. Respondents compared replies to other digital interaction channels such as paralinguistic interactions, the sharing feature "reblogs", and "direct messages" (DMs), citing social considerations and norms around each. We used Goffman's performance theory to draw insights on the perceived semi-public / semi-private space of replies, which enabled users to perform supportive actions that did not belong in their main blogging identity frontstage but that were not backstage either. We discuss the limitation of performance theory to describe a presentation to a limited but unknown audience, and we describe how replies enabled new frontstages such as the delicate ramp up to the performance of intimacy in DMs. We discuss implications for performing support and identity on social media with audiences that are perceived as limited but are unknown.

As non-binary genders become increasingly prevalent, researchers face decisions in how to collect, analyze and interpret research participants' genders. We present two case studies on surveys with thousands of respondents, of which hundreds reported gender as something other than simply women or men. First, Tumblr, a blogging platform, resulted in a rich set of gender identities with very few aggressive or resistive responses; the second case study, online Fantasy Football, yielded opposite proportions. By focusing on variation rather than dismissing non-binary responses as noise, we suggest that researchers can better capture gender in a way that 1) addresses gender variation without othering or erasing non-binary respondents; and 2) minimizes "trolls'" opportunity to use surveys as a mischief platform. The analyses of these two distinct case studies find significant gender differences in community dimensions of participation in both networked spaces as well as offering a model for inclusive mixed-methods HCI research.

There are currently a wide variety of ways to share news with others: from sharing in a personal message, to sharing on a social network, to publicly posting. Through a survey with over one thousand people and an artifact analysis of 262 shared articles, we examine differences in motivations and frequency of sharing news on public, social and private platforms. We find that public sharing is more focused on spreading an ideology, while private sharing in messaging is dominated by stories inspired by the recipient's interests or context. The survey revealed three main groups of news sharing practices: those who shared to all channels (public, social, private), those who didn't share at all, and those who shared to private and social. The groups differed in their attitudes toward online discussion; those that shared the most were neutral and those that didn't share had negative attitudes about discussion online. We discuss sharing practices and implications for social systems that support sharing news.

Mobile videochat use has been growing, especially for teens. To better understand teens' videochat practices, we conducted a two-week photo diary study with 16 teens. We found that most often, teens videochat with their closest friends from their bedrooms when they feel lonely or bored. Teens turned to videochat when understimulated but also felt understimulated during videochat. In order to manage this, they multitasked -teens moved from active chatting to co-presence while engaged in separate activities like scrolling social feeds or playing games. We uncovered social norms of reciprocity of attention, where teens match the attention level of the other and give leeway to briefly divert attention. Digital notifications did not feel disruptive to the videochat but family members' interruptions felt disruptive as teens' domestic context intruded into their virtual peer setting. We discuss these findings and their implications for research and design of videochat systems.

Mobile livestreaming is now well into its third wave. From early systems such as Bambuser and Qik, to more popular apps Meerkat and Periscope, to today's integrated social streaming features in Facebook and Instagram, both technology and usage have changed dramatically. In this latest phase of livestreaming, cameras turn inward to focus on the streamer, instead of outwards on the surroundings. Teens are increasingly using these platforms to entertain friends, meet new people, and connect with others on shared interests. We studied teens' livestreaming behaviors and motivations on these new platforms through a survey completed by 2,247 American livestreamers and interviews with 20 teens, highlighting changing practices, teens' differences from the broader population, and implications for designing new livestreaming services.

Chronic multitaskers perform worse on core multitasking skills: memory management, cognitive filtering and task switching, likely due to their inability to filter irrelevant stimuli [17]. Our experiment examines effects of chronic multitasking with task-relevant and irrelevant distractors on analytical writing quality. We found a general switch cost and, when controlling for that cost, effects of chronic multitasking habits: heavy multitaskers write worse essays in the irrelevant condition and better essays in the relevant condition. Our study changes multitasking research paradigms in two fundamental ways: it studied a realistic writing scenario including access to both irrelevant and relevant distractors. We found that the effect of chronic multitasking is complex; heavy multitaskers are seduced by unrelated distractors but able to integrate multiple sources of relevant information.

The dance production process is strongly influenced within the physical rehearsal space by social context factors and dynamics, such as intimacy of bodies, gender distribution, and the hierarchy of choreographers and dancers. Introducing online tools for asynchronous collaboration can change the traditional dance production process and impact the social dynamics of the group. We developed and deployed the Choreographer's Notebook, a web-based, collaborative, multi-modal annotation tool used in the creative process of making dance. We collected usage logs and choreographer reflections on the use of this tool, along with conducting interviews and focus groups, from the interdisciplinary perspectives of both technologists and choreographers involved in the project. We describe the socio-technical impacts of the Choreographer's Notebook based on the results of its usage in three dance productions. We analyze these case studies through various contextual lenses and provide a visualization of how the choreographic correction process evolved.

Measures of emotion should accurately characterize the nature of an emotional experience and determine whether that experience is universal or unique to a subgroup or culture. We investigated the value of assessing emotion through skin conductance (an easy-to-interpret physiological measure) and sliders (frequently used and direct measures of perceived emotion). This paper describes findings from two experiments. The first evaluated various slider configurations and found that measured emotions successfully characterized the emotional nature of short videos. The second experiment collected the slider and skin conductance measures of emotion while one sample of Japanese participants and another sample of Canadian participants viewed longer videos. The measures were sensitive enough to identify cultural differences consistent with existing literature and were also able to identify parts of the experience where members from different cultures reacted consistently, pinpointing content that provoked a universal experience. We offer a toolkit of data interpretation techniques to gain more insight into the implicit and explicit emotion data: analyses for expressiveness and agreement that can infer states such as engagement and fatigue. We summarize the aspects of our measurement approach and toolkit in a model: the ability to distinguish the emotional nature of stimuli, individuals, and affective interaction.

We present a collaborative tool for choreographers and dancers, the Choreographer's Notebook, which allows multimodal annotation of rehearsal videos during the dance production process. The dance production process is a creative process in which exploration and expression are paramount and we describe issues we have observed over four different dance production cycles. The Choreographer's Notebook addresses the recurring problem of scarcity of rehearsal time and space, which is a limiting factor for exploration and expression. The tool is a web-based video application that enables choreographers to provide multimodal, context-sensitive instructions and feedback to the dancers outside of formal rehearsal time. The novelty of this tool is its ability to provide a multimodal collaborative video-based workflow. This article also presents a thorough ethnographic investigation of the dance production process and results from the use of the Choreographer's Notebook as an artifact within that process.

The integration of interactive technology with temporal art such as dance is an exciting, emerging area. The design space for such collaborations is immense, with variations in sensors, visualizations, and how these interact with dancers and choreography. This paper presents the evaluation methodology and results of Dance.Draw, a longitudinal project spanning two years and three productions, which aimed to develop a deep, interdisciplinary understanding of this space. Given that this is pioneering work, there is little guidance on how to evaluate such collaborations. We describe the significant confounds in doing evaluation in this area, and we present our evolving mixed-methods approach, which includes two unique methods to address the multiple stakeholders in a holistic manner: dancer focus groups and repeated presentations. Our approach has generated insights, such as differing perspectives of audience members and the responses of dancers to technological variables. We conclude by discussing the challenges and successes of our evaluation approach.

Understanding audience responses to art and performance is a challenge. New sensors are promising for measurement of implicit and explicit audience engagement. However, the meaning of biometric data, and its relationship to engagement, is unclear. We conceptually explore the audience engagement domain to uncover opportunities and challenges in the assessment and interpretation of audience engagement data. We developed a display that linked performance videos with audience biometric data and presented it to 7 performing arts experts, to explore the measurement, interpretation and application of biometric data. Experts were intrigued by the response data and reflective in interpreting it. We deepened our inquiry with an empirical study with 49 participants who watched a video of a dance performance. We related temporal galvanic skin response (GSR) data to two self-report scales, which provided insights on interpreting this measure. Our findings, which include strong correlations, support the interpretation of GSR as a valid representation of audience engagement.

Generative Walkthoughs support the redesign phase of an iterative design process, helping designers generate new design alternatives informed by social science principles. Designers first analyze their own scenarios or storyboards with respect to concrete examples drawn from five socio-technical principles: situated action, rhythms & routines, co-adaptive systems, peripheral awareness and distributed cognition. They then walk through the scenario and brainstorm new design alternatives that reflect the design principle in question. This combination of structured walkthroughs with focused brainstorming helps designers, particularly those with little social science background, to generate concrete, actionable ideas that reflect key findings from the social science literature. We taught Generative Walkthroughs in ten courses with over 220 students and found that technically-trained students not only learned these socio-technical principles, but were able to apply them in innovative ways in a variety of design settings.

Many couples are forced to live apart, for work, school or other reasons. This paper describes our study of 13 such couples and what they lack from existing communication technologies. We explored what they wanted to share (presence, mood, environment, daily events and activities), how they wanted to share (simple, lightweight, playful, pleasant interaction), and when they wanted to share ('empty moments' such as waiting, walking, taking a break, waking up, eating, and going to sleep). 'Empty moments' provide a compelling new opportunity for design, requiring subtlety and flexibility to enable participants to share connection without explicit messages. We designed MissU as a technology probe to study empty moments in situ. Similar to a private radio station, MissU shares music and background sounds. Field studies produced results relevant to social science, technology and design: couples with established routines were comforted; characteristics such as ambiguity and 'movable' technology (situated in the home yet portable) provide support. These insights suggest a design space for supporting the sharing of empty moments.

When gathering feedback about an envisioned system, prototypes communicate design ideas to user groups. However, it is unclear how user responses are affected by prototype format. We conducted a 2x2 quasi-experiment (video /storyboard format x older and younger user groups) to test for an interaction between prototype format and user group. We found a significant interaction between prototype format and responses across user groups. Our results indicate that differences in user responses can be misinterpreted as the result of user group characteristics. We advise using multiple prototype formats to counteract a 'media effect'. Alternatively, we advise using storyboards for a smaller 'media effect'.