As social virtual reality (VR) grows more popular, addressing accessibility for blind and low vision (BLV) users is increasingly critical. Researchers have proposed an AI “sighted guide” to help users navigate VR and answer their questions, but it has not been studied with users. To address this gap, we developed a large language model (LLM)-powered guide and studied its use with 16 BLV participants in virtual environments with confederates posing as other users. We found that when alone, participants treated the guide as a tool, but treated it companionably around others, giving it nicknames, rationalizing its mistakes with its appearance, and encouraging confederate-guide interaction. Our work furthers understanding of guides as a versatile method for VR accessibility and presents design recommendations for future guides.

Dental clinics can be challenging sensory environments, creating discomfort and stress, especially for neurodivergent individuals with Sensory Processing Disorder. Interactive environmental systems offer potential to transform these spaces, providing adaptable, sensory-inclusive experiences. However, the design space for environment-based interventions in dental settings remains largely unexplored. To address this, we conducted in-depth 2-hour co-design sessions with 13 neurodivergent participants to explore environment-based strategies to meet diverse sensory needs. We identified five core design goals for inclusive dental environments: experience transformation, distraction, exposure management, restoration, and social facilitation. Our technology-agnostic design catalogue can inform multiple implementation approaches, including projection mapping, ambient displays, and responsive physical elements. We contribute design patterns for interactive environmental systems, methodological insights for participatory design with neurodivergent communities, and demonstrate how tangible materials serve as proxies for environmental interventions, with implications for Augmented Reality system design. This study advances inclusive design practices and highlights co-designing with neurodivergent individuals.

Social virtual worlds provide students in remote online courses with a unique approach to collaborative work and social interactions. However, the use of social virtual worlds in online learning raises concerns about what privacy and ethical issues students might encounter. To shed light on this topic, we examined college students' ( N = 68) ethical and privacy concerns about using social virtual worlds in multiple class sessions, courses, universities, virtual environments, and technologies. Students revealed (a) struggling to manage their identity between classmates and strangers, (b) discomfort over violations of their avatars' personal space, (c) problems of vulnerable populations experiencing harassment, nudity, and loneliness, and (d) concern over companies tracking and storing user data. In addition, the students described the technological advantages that mitigated their privacy and ethical concerns. We discuss the implications of our findings for the future of collaborative learning and the design of social virtual worlds.

Social virtual reality (VR) has become one of the most popular forms of VR. However, despite years of research on how VR interventions can be useful as diagnostic or therapeutic tools for neurodivergent (ND) users, there has been little examination of how accessible social VR may be for such ND individuals. In this paper, we describe an ongoing user study with participants who self-identify with both autism and ADHD (AuDHD) and also self-identify with facing frequent challenges with social interaction. So far, we have recruited four AuDHD participants; we had each participant briefly explore a world on a popular commercial social VR platform and then reflect on this experience afterward in a longer interview section. Through this process, we uncovered various accessibility challenges in social VR, such as difficulties with navigating social norms or managing certain sensory inputs. We also noted ideas on potential accommodations, like a text-based prompt system that can suggest “appropriate” conversation responses. Our work outlines opportunities to improve the accessibility of social VR for an often-overlooked user group.

The rapid growth of virtual reality (VR) has led to increased use of social VR platforms for interaction. However, these platforms lack adequate features to support blind and low vision (BLV) users, posing significant challenges in navigation, visual interpretation, and social interaction. One promising approach to these challenges is employing human guides in VR. However, this approach faces limitations with a lack of availability of humans to serve as guides, or the inability to customize the guidance a user receives from the human guide. We introduce an AI-powered guide to address these limitations. The AI guide features six personas, each offering unique behaviors and appearances to meet diverse user needs, along with visual interpretation and navigation assistance. We aim to use this AI guide in the future to help us understand BLV users’ preferences for guide forms and functionalities.

With the increasing adoption of social virtual reality (VR), it is critical to design inclusive avatars. While researchers have investigated how and why blind and d/Deaf people wish to disclose their disabilities in VR, little is known about the preferences of many others with invisible disabilities (e.g., ADHD, dyslexia, chronic conditions). We filled this gap by interviewing 15 participants, each with one to three invisible disabilities, who represented 22 different invisible disabilities in total. We found that invisibly disabled people approached avatar-based disclosure through contextualized considerations informed by their prior experiences. For example, some wished to use VR’s embodied affordances, such as facial expressions and body language, to dynamically represent their energy level or willingness to engage with others, while others preferred not to disclose their disability identity in any context. We define a binary framework for embodied invisible disability expression (public and private) and discuss three disclosure patterns (Activists, Non-Disclosers, and Situational Disclosers) to inform the design of future inclusive VR experiences.

With recent movements toward disability as a social identity, we explore whether pain associated with chronic pain conditions (e.g., arthritis, Crohn’s disease, lupus) is also linked to identity and representation preferences. Prior work showed social VR users with invisible disabilities noted preliminary interest in using their avatar’s body language to represent their disability-related identities. We examined movement-based social virtual reality (VR) avatar representation preferences by conducting semi-structured interviews with five participants with such chronic pain conditions. Participants incorporated social norms, cultural considerations, and internalized self-stigma into their decision-making about pain disclosure and representation in different contexts. Aligning with previous work on self-presence and embodiment, in order to avoid discomfort, most participants wanted to avoid experiences where their avatar moved in ways that they did not, or could not, move in the physical world (i.e., jumping, bending over from the spine). Two participants also wanted to be able to represent their personal use of clothing and fashion as accommodation in the physical world. We believe this study will further our understanding of how disability-related identities should be represented in social VR spaces.

Social VR has increased in popularity due to its affordances for rich, embodied, and nonverbal communication. However, nonverbal communication remains inaccessible for blind and low vision people in social VR. We designed accessible cues with audio and haptics to represent three nonverbal behaviors: eye contact, head shaking, and head nodding. We evaluated these cues in real-time conversation tasks where 16 blind and low vision participants conversed with two other users in VR. We found that the cues were effective in supporting conversations in VR. Participants had statistically significantly higher scores for accuracy and confidence in detecting attention during conversations with the cues than without. We also found that participants had a range of preferences and uses for the cues, such as learning social norms. We present design implications for handling additional cues in the future, such as the challenges of incorporating AI. Through this work, we take a step towards making interpersonal embodied interactions in VR fully accessible for blind and low vision people.

The present work explores the potential of leveraging a teamwork agent’s identity – signaled through its gendered voice – to support marginalized individuals in gender-imbalanced teams. In a mixed design experiment (N = 178), participants were randomly assigned to work with a female and a male voice agent in either a female-dominated or male-dominated team. Results show the presence of a same-gender voice agent is particularly beneficial to the performance of minority female members, such that they would contribute more ideas and talk more when a female agent was present. Conversely, minority male members became more talkative but were less focused on the teamwork tasks at hand when working with a male-sounding agent. The findings of the present experiment support existing literature on the effect of social presence in gender-imbalanced teams, such that gendered agents serve similar benefits as human teammates of the same gender identities. However, the effect of agents’ presence remains limited when participants have experienced severe marginalization in the past. Based on findings from the present study, we discuss relevant design implications and avenues for future research.

As social VR applications grow in popularity, blind and low vision users encounter continued accessibility barriers. Yet social VR, which enables multiple people to engage in the same virtual space, presents a unique opportunity to allow other people to support a user’s access needs. To explore this opportunity, we designed a framework based on physical sighted guidance that enables a guide to support a blind or low vision user with navigation and visual interpretation. A user can virtually hold on to their guide and move with them, while the guide can describe the environment. We studied the use of our framework with 16 blind and low vision participants and found that they had a wide range of preferences. For example, we found that participants wanted to use their guide to support social interactions and establish a human connection with a human-appearing guide. We also highlight opportunities for novel guidance abilities in VR, such as dynamically altering an inaccessible environment. Through this work, we open a novel design space for a versatile approach for making VR fully accessible.

As social virtual reality (VR) experiences become more popular, it is critical to design accessible and inclusive embodied avatars. At present, there are few, if any, customization features for invisible disabilities (e.g., chronic health conditions, mental health conditions, neurodivergence) in social VR platforms. To our knowledge, researchers have yet to explore how people with invisible disabilities want to self-represent and disclose disabilities through social VR avatars. We fill this gap in current accessibility research by centering the experiences and preferences of people with invisible disabilities. We conducted semi-structured interviews with nine participants and found that people with invisible disabilities used a unique, indirect approach to inform dynamic disclosure practices. Participants were interested in toggling representation on/off across contexts and shared ideas for representation through avatar design. In addition, they proposed ways to make the customization process more accessible (e.g., making it easier to import custom designs). We see our work as a vital contribution to the growing literature that calls for more inclusive social VR.

360-degree videos hold great potential as learning tools that can provide a sense of presence with instructors. However, much remains to be explored about how these videos should be designed. Across three within-subjects studies, we compared the effects of two different narrative styles, monologue and dialogue, on learning experiences in 360-degree videos filmed in an apple orchard. Study 1 presented the 360-degree videos using virtual reality (VR) with head-mounted displays. Study 2 presented the same content in web-based VR using computer screens. Replicating Study 2, Study 3 further examined users' interaction with the video content using on-screen mouse tracking. Across all three studies, participants preferred a monologue format, and also reported higher physical and social presence in this format. Furthermore, greater physical presence correlated with improved recall of informative content. This suggests that many of the benefits of 360-degree videos can be enjoyed even by students and teachers without access to VR headsets, providing more inclusive and accessible learning opportunities.

Cinematic Virtual Reality (CVR), or 360° video, engages users in immersive viewing experiences. However, as users watch one part of the 360° view, they will necessarily miss out on events happening in other parts of the sphere. Consequently, fear of missing out (FOMO) is unavoidable. However, users can also experience the joy of missing out (JOMO). In a repeated measures, mixed methods design, we examined the fear and joy of missing out (FOMO and JOMO) and sense of presence in two repeat viewings of a 360° film using a head-mounted display. We found that users experienced both FOMO and JOMO. FOMO was caused by the users’ awareness of parallel events in the spherical view, but users also experienced JOMO. FOMO did not compromise viewers’ sense of presence, and FOMO also decreased in the second viewing session, while JOMO remained constant. The findings suggest that FOMO and JOMO can be two integral qualities in an immersive video viewing experience and that FOMO may not be as negative a factor as previously thought.

The present study investigates how human subjects collaborate with a computer-mediated chatbot in creative idea generation tasks. In three text-based between-group studies, we tested whether the perceived identity (i.e., whether a partner was believed to be a bot or as a human) or conversational style (human or robotic) of a teammate would moderate the outcomes of participants’ creative production. In Study 1, participants worked with either a chatbot or a human confederate. In Study 2, all participants worked with a human teammate but were informed that their partner was either a human or a chatbot. Conversely, all participants worked with a chatbot in Study 3, but their partner was described as either a chatbot or a human. We investigated differences in idea generation outcomes and found that participants consistently contributed more ideas and ideas of higher quality when they perceived their teamworking partner to be a bot. Furthermore, when the conversational style of the partner was robotic, participants with high anxiety in group communication reported greater creative self-efficacy in task performance. Finally, whether the perceived dominance of a partner and the pressure to come up with ideas during the task mediated positive outcomes of idea generation depended on whether the conversational style of the bot partner was robot- or human-like. Based on our findings, we discussed implications for future design of artificial agents as active team players in collaboration tasks.

In two studies, we investigate how users choose virtual backgrounds and how these backgrounds influence viewers' impressions. In Study 1, we created a web prototype allowing users to apply different virtual backgrounds to their camera views and asked users to select backgrounds that they believed would change viewers' perceptions of their personality traits. In Study 2, we then applied virtual backgrounds picked by participants in Study 1 to a subset of videos drawn from the First Impression Dataset. We then ran a series of three online experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to compare participants' personality trait ratings for subjects (1) with the selected virtual backgrounds, (2) with the original video backgrounds, and (3) with a gray screen as a background. The selected virtual backgrounds did not change the personality trait ratings in the intended direction. Instead, virtual background use of any kind results in a consistent "muting effect" that mitigates very high or low ratings (i.e., compressing ratings to the mean level) compared to the ratings of the video with the original background.

Recent advances in 3D reconstruction technology allow people to capture and share their experiences in 3D. However, little is known about people's sharing preferences and privacy concerns for these reconstructed experiences. To fill this gap, we first present ReliveReality, an experience-sharing method utilizing deep learning-based computer vision techniques to reconstruct clothed humans and 3D environments and estimate 3D pose with only a RGB camera. ReliveReality can be integrated into social virtual environments, allowing others to socially relive a shared experience by moving around the experience from different perspectives, on desktop or in VR. We conducted a 44-participant within-subject study to compare ReliveReality to viewing recorded videos, and to a ReliveReality version with blurring obfuscation. Our results shed light on how people identify with reconstructed avatars, how obfuscation affects reliving experiences, and sharing preferences and privacy concerns for reconstructed experiences. We propose design implications for addressing these issues.

In this paper, we explore the use of virtual reality (VR) in assisting individuals who self-injure. Past work on self-injury in HCI has focused almost exclusively on mobile applications and message boards. As VR systems become more common, it is worth exploring what unique affordances of the technology can be leveraged to support self-injury reduction and cessation. Research on VR intervention and self-injury treatment informed the design of three novel virtual reality experiences. Nineteen interviews were conducted with individuals with current, or a past history of, self-injury with the goals of uncovering overall impressions of the perceived efficacy of VR with this population, as well as better understanding key mechanisms which impact their experience. Our analysis reveals four key elements common across all experiences: transportation, embodiment, immersion/distraction, and sense of control, and additional themes within each unique experience. We discuss the implications of these findings for future intervention design.

To share a virtual reality (VR) experience remotely together, users usually record videos from an individual's point of view and then co-watch these videos. However, co-watching recorded videos limits users to reliving their memories from the perspective from which the video was captured. In this paper, we describe ReliveInVR, a new time-machine-like VR experience sharing method. ReliveInVR allows multiple users to immerse themselves in the relived experience together and independently view the experience from any perspective. We conducted a 1x3 within-subject study with 26 dyads to compare ReliveInVR with (1) co-watching 360-degree videos on desktop, and (2) co-watching 360-degree videos in VR. Our results suggest that participants reported higher levels of immersion and social presence in ReliveInVR. Participants in ReliveInVR also understood the shared experience better, discovered unnoticed things together and found the sharing experience more fulfilling. We discuss the design implications for sharing VR experiences over time and space.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many university classes shifted to remote learning. In some cases, this requirement intersected in productive ways with course content, especially when the class subject matter included virtual environments. This paper describes teacher and student experiences in an upper-level communication course on virtual worlds at a large United States university. As regular lectures moved to video conferencing and asynchronous communication, "field trips" and guest lectures became opportunities for students and teachers to connect remotely using desktops and headsets. We discuss how this will inform the design of future courses that combine face-to-face and virtual instruction.

Distributed teams rely on asynchronous CMC tools to complete collaborative tasks due to the difficulties and costs surrounding scheduling synchronous communications. In this paper, we present VR-Replay, a new communication tool that records and replays avatars with both nonverbal behavior and verbal communication in VR asynchronous collaboration. We describe a study comparing VR-Replay with a desktop-based CVE with audio annotation and a VR immersive CVE with audio annotation. Our results suggest that viewing the replay avatar in VR-Replay improves teamwork, causing people to view their partners as more likable, warm, and friendly. 75% of the users chose VR-Replay as the preferred communication tool in our study.

We present a new type of sharing VR experience over distance which allows people to relive their recorded experience in VR together. We describe a pilot study examining the user experience when people share their VR experience together remotely. Finally, we discuss the implications for sharing VR experiences over time and space.

This paper examines the effects of participants' preferred point of view of two protagonists, and their motivation for this preference, on two viewings of a cinematic 360-degree video filmed from the first person perspective. Before watching the film, which dramatized gender bias in a STEM workplace, participants were asked to state whether they preferred to view the film from the point of view (POV) of a male protagonist, a female protagonist, or make no selection. They were then asked why they held this preference. Their answers were predictive. Participants' tracked head movements, and the events participants recalled from the film, differed according to their pre-stated preference and motivation.

We describe the design, deployment and testing of a module to track and graphically represent user movement in a collaborative virtual environment. This module allows for the comparison of ground-truth user/observer ratings of the affective qualities of an interaction with automatically generated representations of the participants' movements in real time. In this example, we generate three charts visible both to participants and external researchers. Two display the sum of the tracked movements of each participant, and a third displays a “synchrony visualizer”, or a correlation coefficient based on the relationship between the two participants' movements. Users and observers thus see a visual representation of “nonverbal synchrony” as it evolves over the course of the interaction. We discuss this module in the context of other applications beyond synchrony.

Nonverbal behavior can reveal the psychological states of those engaged in interpersonal interaction. Previous research has highlighted the relationship between gesture and learning during instruction. In the current study we applied readily available computer vision hardware and machine learning algorithms to the gestures of teacher/student dyads (N = 106) during a learning session to automatically distinguish between high and low success learning interactions, operationalized by recall for information presented during that learning session. Models predicted learning performance of the dyad with accuracies as high as 85.7 percent when tested on dyads not included in the training set. In addition, correlations were found between summed measures of body movement and learning score. We discuss theoretical and applied implications for learning.