Contemporary museum experiences often incorporate digital media through modern technologies, such as handheld augmented reality (AR). However, these often fall short of providing a holistic visitor experience, as exhibits are still thought, designed, and experienced in isolation and fail to consider the user’s contexts (e. g., physical, social, and personal). To address this issue, we investigate leveraging a digital twin for designing and evaluating interactive exhibitions in large connected spaces through a case study: our publicly available handheld AR-based exhibition “Stayin’ Alive”. During this exhibition, we gained insights from the interaction data of 1303 visitors, post-visit interviews, as well as rich experiences and observations, based on which we identify four opportunity-challenge pairs that contribute design process insights for practitioners and a road map for future research.

This paper investigates avatar self-views in virtual reality (VR) and their impact on multi-user communication scenarios. Self-views in video conferencing have been shown to impact our self-perception and mental load, so we explore whether similar effects occur in VR, as personal and professional gatherings progressively move to virtual spaces with 3D avatars. We identify the following key design dimensions for self-representations in VR: spatiality, anchoring and size, and self-visibility. Based on these, we designed three variants (Remote Perspective View, Personal Mirror, and Miniature Avatar), which we compare to a baseline (No Additional Self-View) in a user study. Our analysis of sixteen dyads playing a word-guessing game requiring verbal and non-verbal communication (i.e., explaining and charades) in VR confirms that self-views are beneficial for communication scenarios that require expressive body language or facial expressions, as this allows monitoring the own avatar's animations. Further, the Miniature Avatar was overall preferred due to its spatiality, world-anchoring, and full self-visibility. Based on our results, we offer design recommendations for self-views covering the key design dimensions in VR.

Supporting remote collaboration through augmented reality facilitates the experience of co-presence by presenting the collaborator’s avatar in the user’s physical environment. While visual user representations are continuously researched and advanced, the audio configuration – especially in combination with different visualizations – is rarely considered. In a user study (n = 48, 24 dyads), we evaluate the combination of two visual (Simple vs. Rich Avatar) with two auditory (Mono vs. Spatial Audio) user representations, to investigate their impact on user’s overall experience, performance, and perceived social presence during collaboration. Our results show a preference for rich auditory and visual user representations, as Spatial Audio supports completion of parallel tasks and the Rich Avatar positively influence user experience. However, the Simple Avatar draws less attention, which potentially benefits task efficiency, advocating for simpler visualizations in performance-oriented settings. Our findings contribute to a deeper understanding of how visual and auditory user representation combinations impact remote collaboration in augmented reality.

The nascent field of mixed reality is seeing an ever-increasing need for user studies and field evaluation, which are particularly challenging given device heterogeneity, diversity of use, and mobile deployment. Immersive analytics tools have recently emerged to support such analysis in situ, yet the complexity of the data also warrants an ex-situ analysis using more traditional non-immersive visual analytics setups. To bridge the gap between both approaches, we introduce ReLive: a mixed-immersion visual analytics framework for exploring and analyzing mixed reality user studies. ReLive combines an in-situ virtual reality view with a complementary ex-situ desktop view. While the virtual reality view allows users to relive interactive spatial recordings replicating the original study, the synchronized desktop view provides a familiar interface for analyzing aggregated data. We validated our concepts in a two-step evaluation consisting of a design walkthrough and an empirical expert user study.

Augmented reality (AR) can create the illusion of being virtually co-located during remote collaboration, e.g., by visualizing remote co-workers as avatars. However, spatial awareness of each other's activities is limited as physical spaces, including the position of physical devices, are often incongruent. Therefore, alignment methods are needed to support activities on physical devices. In this paper, we present the concept of Re-locations, a method for enabling remote collaboration with augmented reality in incongruent spaces. The idea of the concept is to enrich remote collaboration activities on multiple physical devices with attributes of co-located collaboration such as spatial awareness and spatial referencing by locally relocating remote user representations to user-defined workspaces. We evaluated the Re-locations concept in an explorative user study with dyads using an authentic, collaborative task. Our findings indicate that Re-locations introduce attributes of co-located collaboration like spatial awareness and social presence. Based on our findings, we provide implications for future research and design of remote collaboration systems using AR.

Cross-device interaction with tablets is a popular topic in HCI research. Recent work has shown the benefits of including multiple devices into users' workflows while various interaction techniques allow transferring content across devices. However, users are only reluctantly using multiple devices in combination. At the same time, research on cross-device interaction struggles to find a frame of reference to compare techniques or systems. In this paper, we try to address these challenges by studying the interplay of interaction techniques, device utilization, and task-specific activities in a user study with 24 participants from different but complementary angles of evaluation using an abstract task, a sensemaking task, and three interaction techniques. We found that different interaction techniques have a lower influence than expected, that work behaviors and device utilization depend on the task at hand, and that participants value specific aspects of cross-device interaction.

"Rebuild Palmyra?" is a multimedia exhibition about the ancient city of Palmyra, its destruction by Daesh, and the question of whether it should be rebuilt. As such, it tackles today's pressing question of how humanity should deal with the destruction of cultural heritage. In the design of the exhibition, we pursued the Blended Museum approach, in which we strive to seamlessly integrate interactive media into exhibition design to increase the overall visitor experience. In this work, we present the exhibition, which consists of four rooms. We focus on three interactive installations in which the topic of reconstructing Palmyra is mediated using new technologies such as 3D Printing, Augmented Reality, and Virtual Reality. The installations helped visitors in developing their own point of view on the question of rebuilding Palmyra. Lastly, we provide insights into the technical implementation of the installations and discuss the results of quantitative and qualitative evaluations.

People's ability to remember and recall spatial information can be harnessed to improve navigation and search performances in interactive systems. In this paper, we investigate how display size and input modality influence spatial memory, especially in relation to efficiency and user satisfaction. Based on an experiment with 28 participants, we analyze the effect of three input modalities (trackpad, direct touch, and gesture-based motion controller) and two display sizes (10.6" and 55") on people's ability to navigate to spatially spread items and recall their positions. Our findings show that the impact of input modality and display size on spatial memory is not straightforward, but characterized by trade-offs between spatial memory, efficiency, and user satisfaction.