Death is a fundamental aspect of the human condition, shaping how people understand life and existence. Virtual reality (VR) has increasingly been used for virtual engagements with mortality in controlled lab environments, but there remains a limited understanding of how to design and facilitate such experiences in public settings, such as art galleries, where designers must balance interpretive openness with accessibility, safety, and duty of care. This research presents a situated case study of Passing Electrical Storms, a VR art installation by Shaun Gladwell that simulates death and an out-of-body journey through the universe, and analyzes semi-structured interviews with 30 participants about their experiences with the installation. Using Reflexive Thematic Analysis, we examine participants’ experiences, perceptions, and interpretations to explore how the installation supported contemplative engagement with mortality through stillness, pacing, and multi-sensory grounding. Our findings highlight how meaning was co-constructed through bodily sensation, personal belief, and prior experience, and we propose design strategies for public mortality-themed VR that support interpretive engagement while maintaining legibility, emotional safety, and appropriate care in real-world deployment.

This paper presents a novel method for evaluating wayfinding within a public building to provide meaningful insights for stakeholders. Our approach features unique methods for both data collection and evaluation, with a holistic digital capture of the entire virtual environment experienced by participants, maintained in an interactive format for in-depth analysis. We also captured and output data in point cloud formats, raw data text files, and task-specific metrics, which support interactive replays of participants’ experiences. We developed algorithms to extract meaningful insights from the raw data based on assumptions about wayfinding characteristics. The contribution is a flexible framework that can be easily adapted for future projects with adjustable variables to suit specific applications.

Ingestible sensors have become smaller and more powerful and allow us to envisage new human-computer interactions and bodily play experiences inside our bodies. Users can swallow ingestible sensors, which facilitate interior body sensing functions that provide data on which play experiences can be built. We call bodily play that uses ingestible sensors as play technologies “ingestible play”, and we have adopted a research-through-design (RtD) approach to investigate three prototypes. For each prototype, we conducted a field study to understand the player experiences. Based upon these results and practical design experiences, we have developed a design framework for ingestible play. We hope this work can guide the future design of ingestible play; inspire the design of play technologies inside the human body to expand the current bodily play design space; and ultimately extend our understanding of how to design for the human body by considering the bodily experience of one’s interior body.

Virtual Reality (VR) installations using head-mounted displays (HMD) are becoming increasingly popular in public spaces. However, VR's immersive nature engages only the HMD wearer and excludes everyone else in the public space, and there is little design knowledge of how to engage those not wearing an HMD. To address this, we draw from our experiences of having designed seven public VR installations to present a design space around the dimensions of “agency” and “interest” with four user engagement frames to articulate twelve different user roles. To guide designers to support all roles and to transition users between those roles, we complement the design space with a set of design tactics for public VR installations. We hope that these combined contributions will help designers engage more people with VR installations so that ultimately more people benefit from what VR has to offer.

Virtual reality applications for industrial training have widespread benefits for simulating various scenarios and conditions. We present an empirical evaluation of VR training approach using kinesthetics learning strategy in industrial maintenance training, specifically the hydraulic manufacturing industry. Through our collaboration with a leading industry partner, a remote multi-user training platform using head-mounted display was designed and implemented. We present the evaluation of the platform with two diverse cohorts of novice users and industry contractors, in comparison to traditional training using slides, photos, and videos. The results show that VR training is engaging and effective in boosting trainee’s confidence, especially for novice users. Our studies highlight the impact of virtual reality training on trainee experience, performance, and skills transfer, with reflections on the differences between novice and industry trainees.

Interest in combining interactive play and the human body, using “bodily play” systems, is increasing. While these systems primarily prioritize a player's control over their bodily actions, we see intriguing possibilities in the pursuit of “limited control over the body” as an intriguing design resource for bodily play systems. In this paper, we use three of our bodily play systems to illustrate how designers can engage with limited control over the body by varying the player's degree of indirect control (for instance, via other bodily activity and external triggers). We also propose four strategies for employing limited control over the body: Exploration, Reflection, Learning and Embracement. We hope our own work and the strategies developed from it will assist designers to employ limited control over the body, ultimately helping people benefit from engaging their bodies through play.

Imaging capsules are ingestible sensors that capture the video of one's gastrointestinal tract for medical diagnosis. We believe that the capsule's experiential perspective is often overlooked by associated medical applications. This work explores the design of this experiential perspective through combining imaging capsules with digital play. We designed a playful wearable system called "InsideOut", where users play with the real-time video of their gastrointestinal tract captured by an imaging capsule. Based on an in-the-wild study, we derived four themes articulating the play experiences and discussed key design implications to guide future playful designs using imaging capsules. Our research highlights the opportunity of using medical imaging technologies to enable intriguing bodily play experiences. Furthermore, such experiences can deepen the players' engagement with and understanding of their bodies, ultimately contributing to a more playful and humanized health care agenda.

Human-Computer Integration (HInt) is an emerging paradigm in which computational and human systems are closely interwoven. Integrating computers with the human body is not new. however, we believe that with rapid technological advancements, increasing real-world deployments, and growing ethical and societal implications, it is critical to identify an agenda for future research. We present a set of challenges for HInt research, formulated over the course of a five-day workshop consisting of 29 experts who have designed, deployed and studied HInt systems. This agenda aims to guide researchers in a structured way towards a more coordinated and conscientious future of human-computer integration.

Ingestible sensors are pill-like sensors that people swallow mainly for medical purposes. We propose that ingestible sensors also offer unique opportunities to facilitate intriguing bodily experiences in a playful manner. To explore this, we present "HeatCraft", a two-player system that translates the user's body temperature measured by an ingestible sensor to localized thermal stimuli delivered through a waist belt equipped with heating pads. We conducted a study with 16 participants. The study revealed three design themes (Integration of body and technology, Integration of internal body and outside world, and Integration of play and life) along with some open challenges. In summary, this work contributes knowledge to the future design of playful experiences with ingestible sensors.

AutoJam is an interactive music listening experience played on an inactive steering wheel of an autonomous car. By designing AutoJam, our aim was to make in-car music interactive and align music creation with the progression of the traffic situation. Besides being a fun and creative activity for frustrating stop-and-go traffic, AutoJam helps to understand the building blocks of in-car performances. In order to explore the impact of AutoJam, we conducted an in-situ user study with 14 participants. From the findings, we constructed a map of experiential dimensions of AutoJam and found that player's experience, constitute itself through a continuous shifting between those dimensions. Reflecting on this process, we discuss four building blocks of in-car performances. Ultimately, this work aims to frame autonomous driving in difficult traffic as a creative and playful activity promoting situational awareness and musical expression.

Autonomous cars are on the horizon, meaning passengers will no longer have to focus on driving leaving them with extra time for other activities, or engagements. However, research has focused primarily on safety related aspects of autonomous driving, overlooking the need to design for this new free time. This raises the question, how do we design new interactive experiences for the future of autonomous cars? In this paper, we present a design process derived from our research-through-design approach to explore possible everyday use cases of autonomous driving from an experience-focused perspective. We report details of the four methods that constituted, and influenced our design process and led to the creation of AutoGym, an exertion interface with context-based interactions suitable for future car-based commuting. The contribution is twofold: Foremost, our design process suggests guidelines on how to design and simulate future use cases of what we assume will constitute the autonomous driving experience. Secondly, we aim to inspire automotive user experience designers to pursue a context-based design approach by leveraging situational features which support experiences that are tailored and unique to autonomous driving.

Most Augmented Reality applications feature an information overlay over physical objects that consists of text, images, and animated 3-D models. We go a step further by using an AR-menu and linking multiple overlays using occlusion-based triggers that help navigate between the different overlays. This paper describes the development of an AR-based tutorial for a common real-world scenario. Using multiple overlays allows us to design a comprehensive AR tutorial by presenting more information on the same physical object in a hierarchical manner with a narrative structure. We describe the design features in an attempt to elucidate the issues related to the development of the AR tutorials.

We present the use of commodity depth based cameras to control viewpoint from passive unencumbered head tracking. This allowed participants to maintain correct perspective while playing an immersive computer ball game, without the need to wear devices, wires or markers. While viewpoint update is more generally useful than stereoscopy it has traditionally used tracking equipment of expense and complexity unsuitable for home use. The current explosion of depth based cameras into the home game market could provide a cheaper, simpler and more elegant solution. While updating viewpoint from a depth camera has been demonstrated it has not previously been studied in a multi-player or fast moving game or undergone accurate measures of latency, task performance or user experience. We integrated low cost commodity hardware including depth based cameras, computers, projectors and stereo glasses, computer games software, a laptop and large projection surfaces. System latency and user performance and experience were measured across a number of viewpoint conditions. System latency of the viewpoint and hand tracking were measured by analysing high speed video footage. The number of goals scored and saved gave a measure of task performance. Subjective impressions of experience were taken from questionnaire and post interview.