Amid rising concerns over moderation, algorithmic control, and platform governance on centralized social media, people are increasingly turning to decentralized alternatives like Mastodon to regain control over their feeds. This shift offers new opportunities to understand how people perceive and curate their feeds. We conducted a two-part study with 21 Mastodon users: first, interviews exploring how they perceive and manage their feeds; and second, a design probe study using BRAIDS.SOCIAL, a web-based feed curation prototype informed by the first part of our initial findings. We learned how seamful design can increase people's trust in algorithmic curation, and surfaced trade-offs people navigate between machine learning-based and rule-based filtering approaches. We also identify a core design tension in decentralized platforms: whether to support personalization through new applications or extensions layered atop existing ones.

Augmented Reality (AR) presents new opportunities for immersive storytelling. However, this immersiveness faces two main hurdles. First, AR’s immersive quality is often confined to visual elements, such as pixels on a screen. Second, crafting immersive narratives is complex and generally beyond the reach of amateurs due to the need for advanced technical skills. We introduce Jigsaw, a system that empowers beginners to both experience and craft immersive stories, blending virtual and physical elements. Jigsaw uniquely combines mobile AR with readily available Internet-of-things (IoT) devices. We conducted a qualitative study with 20 participants to assess Jigsaw’s effectiveness in both consuming and creating immersive narratives. The results were promising: participants not only successfully created their own immersive stories but also found the playback of three such stories deeply engaging. However, sensory overload emerged as a significant challenge in these experiences. We discuss design trade-offs and considerations for future endeavors in immersive storytelling involving AR and IoT.

Immersive authoring provides an intuitive medium for users to create 3D scenes via direct manipulation in Virtual Reality (VR). Recent advances in generative AI have enabled the automatic creation of realistic 3D layouts. However, it is unclear how capabilities of generative AI can be used in immersive authoring to support fluid interactions, user agency, and creativity. We introduce VRCopilot, a mixed-initiative system that integrates pre-trained generative AI models into immersive authoring to facilitate human-AI co-creation in VR. VRCopilot presents multimodal interactions to support rapid prototyping and iterations with AI, and intermediate representations such as wireframes to augment user controllability over the created content. Through a series of user studies, we evaluated the potential and challenges in manual, scaffolded, and automatic creation in immersive authoring. We found that scaffolded creation using wireframes enhanced the user agency compared to automatic creation. We also found that manual creation via multimodal specification offers the highest sense of creativity and agency.

Immersive authoring tools allow users to intuitively create and manipulate 3D scenes while immersed in Virtual Reality (VR). Collaboratively designing these scenes is a creative process that involves numerous edits, explorations of design alternatives, and frequent communication with collaborators. Version Control Systems (VCSs) help users achieve this by keeping track of the version history and creating a shared hub for communication. However, most VCSs are unsuitable for managing the version history of VR content because their underlying line differencing mechanism is designed for text and lacks the semantic information of 3D content; and the widely adopted commit model is designed for asynchronous collaboration rather than real-time awareness and communication in VR. We introduce VRGit, a new collaborative VCS that visualizes version history as a directed graph composed of 3D miniatures, and enables users to easily navigate versions, create branches, as well as preview and reuse versions directly in VR. Beyond individual uses, VRGit also facilitates synchronous collaboration in VR by providing awareness of users’ activities and version history through portals and shared history visualizations. In a lab study with 14 participants (seven groups), we demonstrate that VRGit enables users to easily manage version history both individually and collaboratively in VR.

Digital communication is often brisk and automated. From auto-completed messages to "likes," research has shown that such lightweight interactions can affect perceptions of authenticity and closeness. On the other hand, effort in relationships can forge emotional bonds by conveying a sense of caring and is essential in building and maintaining relationships. To explore effortful communication, we designed and evaluated Auggie, an iOS app that encourages partners to create digitally handcrafted Augmented Reality (AR) experiences for each other. Auggie is centered around crafting a 3D character with photos, animated movements, drawings, and audio for someone else. We conducted a two-week-long field study with 30 participants (15 pairs), who used Auggie with their partners remotely. Our qualitative findings show that Auggie participants engaged in meaningful effort through the handcrafting process, and felt closer to their partners, although the tool may not be appropriate in all situations. We discuss design implications and future directions for systems that encourage effortful communication.

Immersive authoring is a paradigm that makes Virtual Reality (VR) application development easier by allowing programmers to create VR content while immersed in the virtual environment. In this paradigm, programmers manipulate programming primitives through direct manipulation and get immediate feedback on their program's state and output. However, existing immersive authoring tools have a low ceiling; their programming primitives are intuitive but can only express a limited set of static relationships between elements in a scene. In this paper, we introduce FlowMatic, an immersive authoring tool that raises the ceiling of expressiveness by allowing programmers to specify reactive behaviors---behaviors that react to discrete events such as user actions, system timers, or collisions. FlowMatic also introduces primitives for programmatically creating and destroying new objects, for abstracting and re-using functionality, and for importing 3D models. Importantly, FlowMatic uses novel visual representations to allow these primitives to be represented directly in VR. We also describe the results of a user study that illustrates the usability advantages of FlowMatic relative to a 2D authoring tool and we demonstrate its expressiveness through several example applications that would be impossible to implement with existing immersive authoring tools. By combining a visual program representation with expressive programming primitives and a natural User Interface (UI) for authoring programs, FlowMatic shows how programmers can build fully interactive virtual experiences with immersive authoring.

Creating Virtual Reality (VR) applications normally requires advanced knowledge of imperative programming, 3D modeling, reactive programming, and geometry. Immersive authoring tools propose to reduce the learning curve of VR programming by allowing users to create VR content while immersed in VR. Immersive authoring can take advantage of many of the features that make VR applications intuitive and natural to use-users can manipulate programming primitives through direct manipulation, immediately see the output of their code, and use their innate spatial reasoning capabilities when viewing a program. In this paper, we investigate the benefits and challenges of immersive dataflow authoring. We implemented an immersive authoring tool that enables dataflow programming in VR and conducted a series of retrospective interviews. We also describe design implications for future immersive authoring tools.