Interactions between emergency first responders (EFRs) and Generative Voice Agents (GVAs) are shaping the future of communication in crisis management operations and training. Key issues are the associated security, privacy and ethical concerns of centralized, proprietary, remote GVAs especially in critical tasks. Remote GVAs also impact response times and require high power consumption infrastructure. These characteristics hinder the usability of GVAs since earlier voice assistants. However, open-source, local GVAs provide secure and efficient alternatives, but no standardized process exists to build GVAs in line with EFR’s requirements. This study proposes a unified evaluation framework, EFR-GVA EvalKit, with metrics of regulatory compliance, technical specifications and performance tests inline with EFRs’ applications requirements that prioritize transparency, data sovereignty and usability. We then used the EFR-GVA EvalKit framework to assess and compare the design and development of local GVAs on consumer grade devices with a frontier remote conversational agent in a triage training 3D scenario. A user study (N=19) with EFRs showed the capacity of local GVAs to meet EFRs’ expectations. Compared to existing approaches, our contribution is more comprehensive and engineered for reuse. EFR–GVA EvalKit is introduced in this paper as a new, compliance-gated evaluation method and the triage scenario is its first instantiation and validation, demonstrating how the framework can be replicated across devices and tasks.

We compare four human–robot interaction configurations for semi-autonomous Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV) support in a simulated search-and-rescue task, organised along two orthogonal dimensions: Immersion (screen vs head-mounted display) and Viewpoint (exocentric/top-down vs egocentric/first-person). Thirty-six professional first responders and CBRN specialists completed the task using a 2D screen, a 3D screen, VR, or XR. 2D yielded the highest perceived explainability and self-rated performance; XR showed the lowest mean workload and a trend toward lower perceived difficulty (non-significant); VR increased negative effects (e.g., discomfort). Transparency significantly predicted trust, but with a counterintuitive negative coefficient, suggesting that uncalibrated disclosures can undermine perceived reliability. We report effect sizes and methodological details, discuss design implications for calibrating immersion and viewpoint to balance situational awareness, comfort, and trust in safety-critical operations.

Effective communication is essential in high-stress environments but stress often disrupts the flow of information and leads to miscommunication. While scenario-based training exercises are widely used, post-hoc reflection and analysis of verbal interactions remain challenging due to overlapping speech, limited analysis time, and the dynamic nature of these situations. This paper introduces ROGER, a novel visual analytics interface designed to support after-action reviews of communication during high-stress training scenarios. Developed in collaboration with police trainers through an iterative design study, ROGER integrates emotional voice metrics, heart rate variability, and spoken language content to provide a comprehensive analysis of team communication. The system enables a flexible in-depth exploration of communication patterns through motifs—repeated sequences or content elements—including those generated by a large language model (LLM) as well as predefined ones. Our approach addresses the limitations of existing tools, which focus primarily on content summarization or voice replays without incorporating emotional and stress-related voice data. We validated the utility through interviews with police trainers and conducted a workshop with medical first responders to investigate the potential for cross-domain applicability. Our findings provide preliminary evidence that ROGER supports effective team performance analysis in diverse high-stress environments. See also supplemental material at https://osf.io/pc6un

In the field of medical first responder training, the choice of training modality is crucial for skill retention and real-world application. This study introduces the Green Manikin, an advanced Mixed Reality (MR) tool, conceptually combining the immersiveness of Virtual Reality (VR) with the tangibility of real-world training, and compares it against traditional real-world simulations and VR training. Our findings indicate that MR and real-world settings excel in Self and Social Presence, and in intention to use, offering heightened psychological presence suitable for complex training scenarios. Effort expectancy was highest in real-world environments, suggesting their ease of use for basic skill acquisition. This nuanced understanding allows for better tailoring of training modalities to specific educational objectives. Our research validates the utility of MR and offers a framework for selecting the most effective training environment for different learning outcomes in medical first responder training.

Makerspaces hold a lot of potential for participation in innovation, democratization of technology, and as a resource for community building – but not all who make, are represented in makerspaces: many makers do not feel at home in these spaces. This paper investigates the wants and needs of people who are engaged with making. It describes the result of four co-creation events, in which participants constructed their ideal version of a makerspace. By analysing the thoughts and ideas that participants shared during the building process, and the resulting physical representations of makerspaces, we uncovered two distinct tensions in what makers require from their ideal makerspace: the tension between having fun in a space and a space that is functional; and the tension between having the opportunity to collaborate with other people, versus undisturbed focus on projects. We contextualize these findings in literature related to makerspaces and offer suggestions for dealing with these tensions through design.

Abstract This paper presents the results of a 5-month diary study into the practices and routines that develop around technological making in the home, particularly focused on the experiences of women, as they continue to be an underrepresented group in the maker community. In this study, we provided participants with an entry-level electronics making kit. Over the course of twenty weeks, the participants documented their making activities via photos, videos, text messages and taking part in interviews. By means of interpretative phenomenological analysis, we identified six core themes related to women’s experiences with technological making in the home. These experiences ranged from positive—feeling challenged, proud of accomplishments, inspired; to negative—feeling frustrated, guilty due to lack of progress or confused and overwhelmed. These experiences are discussed and contextualized by aspects related to hurdles experienced by the participants, and success factors that contribute to proactive engagement with making in the home. Research Highlights Twenty-week photo diary study and interpretative phenomenological analysis. Identification of six core themes based on empirical data on experiences with technological making in the home context. Discourse around thresholds to engage women in technological making and the maker community. Design and research directions to reduce barriers in technological making.

In medical simulation training two approaches are currently rather disjunct: realistic manikins are used to teach physical skills and procedures and VR systems are used to train situation assessment and decision making. We propose a mixed reality approach, which allows trainees to use real tools and their hands when interacting with a physical manikin overlaid with a responsive virtual avatar. In close exchange with first responder organizations, we developed and evaluated an MR training scenario. In the scenario, users can talk to injured people in a car accident, assess the threat of the environment, and utilize real medical equipment. Participants experienced high levels of physical- and self-presence, increased stress levels, and reported a high technology acceptance. The proposed main requirements of first responders regarding haptic multi-sensory skill training in MR and the lessons learned from the workshop aim to guide the design of training solutions for medical training in MR.

Access to art and cultural heritage is an important aspect of the well-being of humans. Within the BeauCoup project, we aim to create solutions to improve access to cultural heritage for older adults with and without impairments. In this paper, we present tangible, interactive postcards, which were developed in a user-centered design process within the project. These digital tangible postcards are a cheap, ubiquitous and easily transportable solution to make artworks - especially paintings - interactively accessible to people with visual impairments. We describe the developed solutions and will strive to discuss with the community the general concept, improvements and further application areas.

Tangible devices and interaction in Extended Reality (XR) increase immersion and enable users to perform tasks more intuitively, accurately and joyfully across the reality-virtuality continuum. Upon reviewing the literature, we noticed no clear trend for a publication venue, as well as no standard in evaluating the effects of tangible XR. To position the topic of tangible XR in the TEI community, we propose a hands-on studio, where participants will bring in their own ideas for tangible XR from their application fields, and develop prototypes with the cutting-edge technology and a selection of virtual assets provided. Additionally, we will collectively reflect upon evaluation methods on tangible XR, and aim to find a consensus of a core evaluation suite. With this, we aim to foster a practical understanding and spark new developments in tangible XR and its use cases within the TEI community.

Immersive virtual training environments are used in various domains. In this work we focus on role-play training in virtual reality. In virtual role-play training conversations and interactions with virtual agents are often fundamental to the training. Therefore, the appearance and behavior of the agents plays an important role when designing role-play training. We focus on the gender appearance of agents, as gender is an important aspect for differentiation between characters. We conducted a study with 40 participants in which we investigated how agents gender appearance influences the perception of the agents´ personality traits and the self-perception of a participants’ assumed role in a training for social skills. This work contributes towards understanding the design-space of virtual agent design, virtual agent gender identity, and the design and development of immersive virtual reality role-play training.

Haptic qualities of surfaces play an important role for the user's experience with a system. In that context, soft touch surfaces are important as they are often used for surfaces of industrial products. For assessing related experiences, research is often focusing on physical properties of the surfaces rather than the (quality of) experience of the user. Therefore, we set out to analyze how people describe their experience of surface properties in a bottom-up approach. In an Open Profiling study we let people self-describe, cluster and rate surface properties. Based on these ratings we applied a Principal Component Analysis to identify characteristics and related perception dimensions of soft touch surfaces. Furthermore, we complement this with an expert clustering of user self-descriptions. Our analysis shows that descriptions can be categorized in pragmatic and hedonic (and/or affective) dimensions. With this research we contribute to better understanding the quality of material related experiences.

Regular physical exercise is an essential factor for preventing chronic diseases. Activities to support physical education in schools have been increasingly used in recent years as a target to get young people interested in sports. However, for visually impaired students it is difficult to participate in traditional team sports which are widely played in physical education. To overcome this issue, we developed a design toolkit consisting of building blocks that enable visually impaired students to create and play their own movement-based games. To investigate different types of building blocks and their potential to create accessible movement-based games, we conducted two game design workshops with visually impaired students. The results show that our building blocks can successfully be used by visually impaired students to empower them to become creators of movement-based games that are both accessible and engaging. By making our design-process transparent, we further provide insights on how to implement a co-creation process in a school for visually impaired students.

The use of Virtual Reality Environments (VREs) is gaining popularity in various application areas. The combination of a traffic simulation and VRE enables to evaluate whether a newly planned street environment is perceived as safe and pleasant from the pedestrian’s perspective. In this context, the quality of speed perception is of major importance. Thus, experiments were conducted to evaluate the quality of vehicle speed perception in a fully immersive VRE. In a speed estimation task, twenty participants reported their speed estimation on passing cars in different scenarios. The participants underestimated actual speed in all scenarios, whereby passing cars with a lower speed of 30 km/h were underestimated more than with 50 and 70 km/h. This contradicts the results of studies in real-world where pedestrians were able to accurately estimate speeds up to 40 km/h and tend to underestimate higher speeds over 40 km/h. Further investigations with additional contexts and scenarios are therefore necessary to find out why speed perception in a VRE is different from speed perception in real-world.

Orientation and Mobility (O&M) training is an important aspect in the education of visually impaired students. In this work we present a scavenger hunt-like location-based game to support O&M training. In two comparative studies with blind and partially sighted students and interviews with teachers we investigate if a mobile game played in the real world is a suitable approach to support O&M training and if a mobile location-based O&M training game is preferred over a game played in a virtual world. Our results show that a mobile location-based game is a fruitful approach to support O&M training for visually impaired students, and that a mobile location based game is preferred over playing in a virtual world. Based on the gathered insights we discuss implications for using mobile location-based games in O&M training.

Experience assessment is a key activity for understanding and developing interactive systems and technologies. Virtual reality (VR) is no exception, considering its rising popularity and the increasing availability of affordable VR devices. However, in experience studies where participants typical have to rate multiple test conditions presented to them, having to repeatedly take off the head mounted display (HMD) just for the purpose of issuing ratings is cumbersome and breaks the immersion. As a solution we present VRate, a Unity3D asset to integrate subjective experience questionnaires directly in virtual reality environments. The suitability of VRate has been proven by successfully using the asset in a QoE and a UX study. We describe the technical implementation and suggest how to integrate the VRate in a study setup. VRate will be provided to the scientific community for research purposes, educational and noncommercial usage under a Creative Commons License.

In this paper, we evaluate the influence of different VR rendering styles on the QoE of users of a training application. To this end, we present the results of a lab-based QoE study featuring a virtual manufacturing training setting in which participants were asked to correctly allocate spare parts to mounting locations inside and outside a vehicle using an HTC Vive VR Setup. We evaluate how five different rendering styles (defined by rendering technique and shader used), ranging from point cloud to highly photo-realistic, affect different quality dimensions such as perceived visual quality, task difficulty, spatial orientation ability, and discomfort (including cyber-sickness). Our results show that while rendering style has a significant impact on QoE and other dimensions (like task completion time), a standard shader already can provide sufficient quality to support the provided training task and can even outperform rendering styles using more sophisticated techniques like ambient occlusion. Furthermore, we also discuss significant influence of user-related factors like previous experience with VR or gender as well as other related critical issues to be considered in VR training application and assessment study design.

Current apps for cyclists follow the "stop-to-interact" paradigm, neglecting that people interact with their smartphones in motion. We conducted two studies to explore paradigms for interaction that can be applied while cycling. In an enactment study, participants freely explored movements suitable for interaction while using a bicycle trainer and discussed respective requirements and constraints. The analysis of the interaction movements and the group discussion showed that users preferred to keep their hands on the handlebars while performing subtle gestures with their fingers. Based on this we performed an outdoor study focused on interacting with a smartphone game while riding a bicycle, using three interaction options: buttons on the handlebars, the phone's touchscreen, and a wristband activated by flipping the wrist. Using buttons resulted in a significantly lower physical demand and significantly lower frustration compared to the other alternatives, as well as better task performance compared to interacting using the wristband.

In this paper we compare one single-screen touch interaction with an automated teller machine (ATM) against two alternative second-screen ATM interactions using a smartphone. In an experimental laboratory study, those three ATM interactions were compared by means of workload (NASA-TLX), usability (SEQ, UMUX) and technology acceptance (selected TAM3-scales and additional scales for trust and security) in a randomized, controlled within-subjects design (n=24). In one smartphone ATM interaction the Personal Identification Number (PIN) was entered on the mobile phone, in the other smartphone ATM interaction the PIN was entered on the PIN-pad of the ATM. The results indicate that overall second-screen ATM interaction all interaction done on the mobile phone -- performed best.