In mixed reality environments, virtual objects can obscure real-world obstacles, creating a risk of collision when users walk through them. Although users may choose to detour around virtual objects, this behavior also carries risks, such as colliding with obstacles or pedestrians along the detour route. To reduce collision risks, it is essential to understand the factors that determine whether users walk through or detour, as well as the walking paths associated with each behavior. In this research, we investigated users’ walking behavior toward both a static virtual obstacle and a virtual obstacle that disappeared as the user approached. Our findings suggest that individual characteristics and the width of the virtual obstacle influence the decision to walk through or detour. Furthermore, while most users initially chose paths that detoured around the virtual obstacle, once the obstacle began to disappear, they switched their walking paths toward the space where it had been.

This paper investigates a hybrid robot that integrates physical and AR body parts, focusing on how the presentation modalities of the head and arms impact human perception of social presence. We implemented a hybrid robot system that allows switching the presentation modalities of the head and arms between physical and AR, and compared four conditions: both physical, physical head and AR arms, AR head and physical arms, and both AR. Two experiments were conducted with different tasks: material explanation and multi-party discussion. These experiments demonstrate that the hybrid robot with a physical head and AR arms effectively overcomes AR device limitations, achieving a social presence comparable to or greater than that of a fully physical robot. The findings also show that the specific AR-presented body parts significantly influence evaluations, underscoring the importance of careful design in hybrid robots.

Electrical muscle stimulation (EMS) can directly induce finger flexion, providing a promising supplementary modality for information presentation beyond vision and audition. However, the perceptual resolution of EMS remains poorly understood, particularly when applied to different fingers. We conducted a systematic experiment to examine how accurately humans can discriminate multiple levels of EMS intensity applied to different fingers. Results showed that participants were able to discriminate EMS intensities both with and without visual access to their fingers, indicating that reliable recognition was possible even in the absence of visual feedback. Across fingers and visibility conditions, mean accuracies reached 87.5%, 72.9%, and 60.6% for the 3-, 4-, and 5-step conditions. The little and middle fingers yielded higher performance than the index and ring fingers. These findings provide the first systematic characterization of finger-specific perceptual limits and error patterns in EMS-based interaction, and derive design guidelines for allocating signals across fingers and intensity steps.

This paper introduces HoloBots, a mixed reality remote collaboration system that augments holographic telepresence with synchronized mobile robots. Beyond existing mixed reality telepresence, HoloBots lets remote users not only be visually and spatially present, but also physically engage with local users and their environment. HoloBots allows the users to touch, grasp, manipulate, and interact with the remote physical environment as if they were co-located in the same shared space. We achieve this by synchronizing holographic user motion (Hololens 2 and Azure Kinect) with tabletop mobile robots (Sony Toio). Beyond the existing physical telepresence, HoloBots contributes to an exploration of broader design space, such as object actuation, virtual hand physicalization, world-in-miniature exploration, shared tangible interfaces, embodied guidance, and haptic communication. We evaluate our system with twelve participants by comparing it with hologram-only and robot-only conditions. Both quantitative and qualitative results confirm that our system significantly enhances the level of co-presence and shared experience, compared to the other conditions.

In recent decades, companies and other organizations have been increasingly focusing on agile software development methods, and Scrum has been increasingly introduced into software development projects. However, teams in the early stages of Scrum adoption tend to focus on adhering to development processes and practices, often neglecting the four essential values declared in the Agile Manifesto. This paper proposes a field of retrospective called Agile Manifesto Farm (AMF) as a method to promote awareness of the four values and to progressively formalize and establish the knowledge obtained through the activities of each sprint. As a case study, the proposed method is applied in a project-based learning class.

When manipulating virtual objects in AR space, the target object is often occluded by other objects partially or completely (hereinafter, occlusion problem). In addition, the hand-ray manipulation that is commonly used in many AR devices requires the user to keep raising the arm within the range of the hand tracking sensor and causes the gorilla-arm problem. In this study, we propose an object manipulation method that combines eye gaze and a hand-held controller to mitigate the occlusion problem and gorilla-arm problem in AR environments. In the proposed method, the user controls the ray’s direction with eye gaze, and the user adjusts the length of the ray and selects objects with the hand-held controller.

We developed a hat-shaped touch interface for virtual reality viewpoint control. The hat is made of conductive fabric and thus is lightweight. The user can touch, drag, and push the surface, enabling three-dimensional viewpoint control.

Recent developments in gaze tracking present new opportunities for social computing. This paper presents a study of Tama, a gaze actuated smart speaker. Tama was designed taking advantage of research on gaze in conversation. Rather than being activated with a wake word (such as "Ok Google") Tama detects the gaze of a user, moving an articulated 'head' to achieve mutual gaze. We tested Tama's use in a multi-party conversation task, with users successfully activating and receiving a response to over 371 queries (over 10 trials). When Tama worked well, there was no significant difference in length of interaction. However, interactions with Tama had a higher rate of repeated queries, causing longer interactions overall. Video analysis lets us explain the problems users had interacting with gaze. In the discussion, we describe implications for designing new gaze systems, using gaze both as input and output. We also discuss how the relationship to anthropomorphic design and taking advantage of learned skills of interaction. Finally, two paths for future work are proposed, one in the field of speech agents, and the second in using human gaze as an interaction modality more widely.

We propose to artificially manipulate participants' vocal cues, amplitude and frequency, in real time to adjust their dominance and persuasiveness during audio conferences. We implemented a prototype system and conducted two experiments. The first experiment investigated the effect of vocal cue manipulation on the perception of dominance. The results showed that participants perceived higher dominance while listening to a voice with a high amplitude and low frequency. The second experiment investigated the effect of vocal cue manipulation on persuasiveness. The results indicated that a person with a low amplitude and low frequency voice had greater persuasiveness in conversations with biased dominance, while there was no statistically significant difference in persuasiveness in conversations with unbiased dominance.

How, from childhood, can we start to develop a more empathetic and cooperative society? Based on the play value for children's social development, this research aims to back up the surge of `interactive playgrounds`, a proposal that combines the interactive attractiveness of modern multi-sensory technologies with traditional elements of playground environments. In order to understand their sensory effects, we propose a play and design team workshop with children, where we will observe if different stimulus during play activity can affect their empathetic considerations toward others and their practical collaborative behavior. On this paper, we focus on this workshop experiment plan, describing its goals, the intended tools for obtaining data with infant collaborators, and our expected results. From the results, we expect to develop guidelines for sensory stimulus usage on new interactive playground and play tools designs.

In this study, we used a humanoid robot as a telepresence robot and compared with the basic telepresence robot which can only rotate the display in order to reveal the effect of embodiment. We also investigated the effect caused by changing the body size of the humanoid robot by using two different size of robots. Our experimental results revealed that the embodiment increases the remote person's social telepresence, familiarity, and directivity. The comparison between small and big humanoid robots showed no difference and both of them were effective.

A long-standing challenge of video-mediated communication systems is to correctly represent remote participant gaze direction in local environments. A telepresence robot with a movable display that shows the face of a remote participant is a promising approach for solving this issue. Researchers generally consider that display orientation is effective for local participants to properly estimate the gaze direction of remote participants. We investigate how subjects estimate gaze direction of a remote participant ("Looker") when his/her face is displayed on a rotatable flat display. Our experiment reveals that both the Looker's head-eye rotation in the display and display rotation affect subject estimation, but the effect of the display rotation is relatively small. Furthermore, we reveal that subjects tend to overestimate Looker gaze direction. Based on our results, we propose a design implication for a telepresence robot to reduce overestimation and properly represent the remote participant gaze direction.

In this paper we consider the development of a museum guide robot that has both autonomous and remotely controlled features. We focus on the capabilities such a robot could have to help focus the attention of a visitor on an object or artefact. Inspired by studies of social interaction, which investigate whether the robot could deploy "restarts" and "pauses" at certain moments in its talk to first elicit the visitor's attention/gaze towards the robot. We report an experiment where we deployed such a robot to interact with real visitors to a science museum. These experiments show that such a strategy does seem to have a significant impact on obtaining the visitor's gaze.