• A holistic framework of conversational agent (CA) empathy is developed and validated, integrating user insights with established empathy theories. • Open-ended surveys reveal core empathic behaviors in CAs, leading to the identification of four key agent traits: Active Listening, Personalization, Emotional Expressivity, and Persona Attractiveness. • The Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) is applied to examine the influence of these traits on user perceptions of cognitive and affective empathy components. • Structural equation modeling confirms the impact of each trait on user evaluations of perspective-taking, fantasy, empathic concerns, and personal distress, providing guidance for designing empathetic CAs. As Conversational Agents (CAs) increasingly interact with users on social and emotional levels, understanding how these agents convey empathy has become a critical challenge. This paper reports on an exploratory mixed-methods study that propose and empirically explores an initial framework for CA empathic responsiveness. The research proceeds in two sequential studies. Study 1 first conducted a qualitative analysis of open-ended surveys (N=166, U.S. and South Korea) to identify key user-defined empathic behaviors. Through thematic analysis, these insights were integrated with existing empathy theories to derive a framework of four core agent characteristics: Active Listening (AL), Personalization (PE), Emotional Expressivity (EE), and Persona Attractiveness (PA). Study 2 then conducted a quantitative investigation in South Korea (N=200) using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to test this framework. Empathic responsiveness was operationalized adopting Agent Empathic Reactivity Index (AERI), a validated CA-specific adaptation of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), assessing perspective-taking, fantasy, empathic concerns, and personal distress. SEM results confirmed all 12 hypothesized paths. AL and PE strongly enhanced perspective-taking and empathic concerns, while PE also significantly reduced personal distress. Notably, EE and PA had dual effects: they improved positive dimensions, such as fantasy, but also significantly increased users’ perception of the agent’s personal distress. These findings highlight the delicate balance required in designing emotionally resonant CAs. This work advances the theoretical understanding of multidimensional agent empathy and provides actionable, nuanced guidance for designers aiming to build trust and foster long-term user relationships.

Previous studies have investigated which context-sharing interfaces are effective in improving task performance; however, consistent results have yet to be found. In this study, we developed a convenient remote collaboration system that provides multiple context-sharing interfaces in a single platform (2D video, 360° video, and 3D reconstruction view). All interfaces can reflect live updates of environmental changes, and we aimed to clarify the effect of the interface on the quality of remote collaboration. Thirty participants were recruited to perform a target-finding-and-placing scenario. Using both objective and subjective metrics, we compared the task performance among the three interface conditions. The results showed that participants completed the task faster and reported a better collaborative experience in the 3D interface condition. Moreover, we found a strong preference for the 3D view interface. These results suggest that providing 3D reconstructed spatial information can enable remote experts to instruct local workers more effectively.

When using Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) to support remote collaboration, effective communication between a remote expert in VR and a local worker in AR is important for guiding and following task instructions. This is especially crucial for assembly tasks, which require precise identification of parts and clear directions for their combination. Despite the increasing interest in efficient VR-AR communication methods, previous studies have been limited to complex hardware setups and simplified assembly tasks. In this research, we introduce a communication approach for remote collaboration in complex assembly tasks, utilizing simplified hardware configurations. We conducted a user study (n=30) and compared three interaction interfaces (hand gestures, 3D drawing, and virtual replicas) in task completion time, subjective questionnaires, and preference rank. The results showed that the use of virtual replicas not only enhances task efficiency but also receives strong preference by users. These findings indicate that virtual replicas can provide intuitive instructions to local workers, resulting in a clearer understanding of the expert’s guidance.

Abusive activity frequently occurs in various places, including nursing homes for the elderly. However, it is difficult to detect because it has various forms and is not easy to define. Therefore, in this study, we try to detect using the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Data based on multimodality (image and sound) was used to improve detection performance. In case of the image, a Motion History Image (MHI) was used to reflect motion information. The developed multi-modality-based detection system showed a performance of 0.807 (Accuracy) and 0.858 (F1 score). By comparing with the system using only image or sound, there is an improvement of 0.132 ~ 0.17 (Accuracy) and 0.094 ~ 0.138 (F1 score)

Since the vision of a Digital Earth (DE) was introduced in 1998, geo-browsers seem to have nearly fulfilled this vision. Virtual reality (VR) for visualizing the DE provides an immersive user experience in a mirror world. Location-based augmented reality (AR) browsers have been introduced and provide content according to user and environmental contexts. However, the content models of traditional geo-browsers and AR browsers have very limited interoperability, because they are described in application-specific formats using their domain standards. Each application is vertically integrated from content to application. The Web is an interoperable and open platform, and hundreds of millions of users are already using it to create and share content. To envision DE browsers for cross-reality (XR) environments that concurrently support geovisualization as well as VR, AR, and mixed-reality environments, we propose a DE content model based on Web standards and architecture that provides full interoperability and openness for XR browsers as a first-class citizen of the Web. This is expected to improve the DE content development efficiency by fully using the Web content development environment.

In virtual reality (VR), users can experience symptoms of motion sickness, which is referred to as VR sickness or cybersickness. The symptoms include but are not limited to eye fatigue, disorientation, and nausea, which can impair the VR experience of users. Though many studies have attempted to reduce the discomfort, they produced conflicting results with varying degrees of VR sickness. In particular, a visually improved VR does not necessarily result in decreased VR sickness. To understand these unexpected results, we surveyed the causes of VR sickness and measurement of symptoms. We reorganized the causes of the VR sickness into three major factors (hardware, content, and human factors) and investigated the sub-component of each factor. We then surveyed frequently used measures of VR sickness, both subjective and objective approaches. We also investigated emerging approaches for reducing VR sickness and proposed a multimodal fidelity hypothesis to give an insight into future studies.

In this article, we present an automatic pose generation approach for robotic 3-D scanning systems designed for the reverse engineering of mechanical parts. 3-D scanning of an object is usually a highly complicated process that involves aligning multiple measurements from different viewpoints, fusing the merged data, and finally reconstructing the underlying surface. The reconstruction is often performed in isolation to the acquisition step. In contrast, the measured data often exhibit holes owing to limited viewpoints or noises in measurements, which can be observed after the postprocessing. Previous approaches either use the predefined scan paths without knowledge of the actual surface, or calculate the scan path based on the approximated smooth surface enclosing the incomplete scanned measurement. The need for an accurate 3-D scanning of mechanical parts often arises for reverse engineering purposes, as their shape often exhibits sharp corners or continuous shape of primitives (planes, cylinders, etc.), which the existing pipelines do not consider. We suggest a 3-D scan pipeline specifically designed to generate optimal scan paths of mechanical parts from incomplete data with limited fields of view. Our pipeline detects primitives from the scanned partial data, and utilizes the detection to approximate the underlying shape of the ground truth object; thus, it suggests the next-best-view of the scanner from the scarce measurements. In this regard, the suggested method is the first working pipeline specifically designed for scanning mechanical parts; furthermore, it outperforms previous approaches in terms of an efficient scan path generation.

Recently virtual reality (VR) technology has been widely distributed, but VR interaction devices supported in web environments are limited compared with in the traditional VR environment. In the traditional VR environment, the Virtual-Reality Peripheral Network (VRPN) provides a device-independent and network-transparent interface. To promote the development of WebVR applications with various interaction devices, a method like VRPN is required in the web environment as well. In this paper, we propose a webizing method for human interface devices and related events that serves as either VRPN messages or HTML DOM events to deal with interaction events.

With steady growth in the deployment of sensor networks and widespread usage of mobile devices, the production of geo-referenced data is increasing exponentially, while analysis of the data typically uses a variety of application services on the Internet for activities such as logging and driving. This geo-referenced content needs to be classified and organized according to user interest for location-based decision-making. In this study, we define a user interest model and propose a method for organizing and presenting content based on the model. Our approach reconstructs geo-referenced content from a variety of sources based on points of interest organized by the user interest model. We present typical cases of using the proposed method, including a theme park resort, personal weather stations, and travel planning to show how the proposed method facilitates user decision-making based on the geo-referenced content.

This demonstration shows a novel approach for Webizing mobile augmented reality, which uses HTML as its content structure, and its real-life use cases. Insight is a mobile AR Web browser that executes HTML5-based AR applications. By extending physical objects and places with a uniform resource identifier (URI), we could build objects of interest for mobile AR application as document object model (DOM) elements and control their behavior and user interactions through DOM events in standard HTML documents. A new CSS media type is defined to augment virtual objects to the physical objects. In this model, we introduce the concept of PLACE, which is the model of a physical space in which the user can be located. With this approach, mobile AR applications can be seamlessly developed as common HTML documents under the current Web eco-system. The advantages of the webized mobile AR, which is able to utilize all kind of Web resources without reworking, and its high productivity due to the seamless development of AR contents in HTML documents are shown with real-life use cases in various domains, such as shopping, entertainment, education, and manufacturing.

Information presentation techniques are important in augmented reality applications as they are in the traditional desktop user interface (WIMP) and web user interface [6]. This paper introduces view management for a web-based augmented reality mobile platform. We use a webized mobile AR browser called Insight that provides separation of the application logic, including the tracking engine and AR content, so that the view management logic and contents are easy to reuse. In addition, the view management is able to accommodate in-situ context of an AR application.

The depiction and navigation of large-scale urban landscapes are limited by the great cost of traditional computer-aided design (CAD) models for large urban environment in terms of both the labor of data entry and the runtime computational expense. This article presents a hybrid modeling approach that enables rapid urban model production from legacy spatial data. Our scheme fills the gap between the low geometry models, such as photo-textured digital terrains, and high geometry models, such as true three-dimensional CAD models. To achieve optimal performance in modeling and rendering, we employ bilayered displacement mapping consisting of global displacement mapping (GDM) for terrains and local displacement mapping (LDM) for buildings. The LDM is performed only within image processing so that the complexity of the models depends only on the area of an urban model. We present a use case of rapid urban model production to compare our approach with the traditional polygonal urban models of a widely used geo-browser.

Virtual reality simulators have been developed as tools for the transfer of knowledge and education. Concurrently, the demand for exhibition systems of science education and cultural experiences has also increased. Existing VR (virtual reality) simulators, which are based on the calculation of dynamics equations, cannot easily be adapted to changes in simulation content. In order to transfer knowledge and maintain interest through educational applications, an experiential system that has multi-sensory effects as well as motion effects is needed. The authors proposed a method for motion generation that is tailored to riding systems and multi-sensory VR effects. In this study, both sense of motion, which is generated from movement of the viewpoint of the visual image, and motion effects, which are prepared in advance, are blended to realize motion simulation by the proposed method. Motion effects can easily be added by interaction between the user and the riding system. Various sensory cues are also implemented to the riding system