Physics governs everyday interaction, yet in Virtual Reality (VR) the fidelity of such interactions can diverge from reality. We investigate how Physical Fidelity (virtual object behavior) and Action Fidelity (virtual hand behavior) of physics-driven interaction shape user experience. In a within-subject study (n = 34), participants performed gamified tasks under three conditions: No-Physics (lower Physical and Action Fidelity), Object-Physics (higher Physical, lower Action Fidelity), and Full-Physics (higher Physical and Action Fidelity). Results show that higher Physical Fidelity reduces task efficiency and increases overall workload, with the No-Physics condition outperforming the others in these metrics. When combined with higher Action Fidelity, although efficiency gets even worse in some cases, the Full-Physics condition enhances body ownership and interaction quality. The hybrid Object-Physics condition consistently ranks lowest across all qualitative measures. Interpreting these results through the Interaction Fidelity Model, we offer design implications for VR applications.

Tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) are a highly entertaining activity, offering players the opportunity to immerse themselves in imaginary worlds and engage in collaborative storytelling.Beyond their recreational value, they have also emerged as a potentially powerful tool for education.By providing a hands-on, experiential approach to learning, TTRPGs can foster critical thinking, problemsolving, and a deeper understanding of historical events and contexts.This paper explores their potential as a once-off time limited activity for history education, focusing on how historical information can be integrated into gameplay.We conducted a study with 16 adult players across four groups, using a TTRPG adventure prototype set in the Archaic Era of Ancient Greece.The sessions aimed to assess learning outcomes and gather feedback on participants' preferences for the inclusion of historical information and the right balance between facts and fiction.The results reveal implications for the design of in-game mechanics as well as supporting, physical and digital, content, to promote learning objectives, offering insights for both educators and game designers.Understanding players' interaction with historical content in a role-playing context can help create more engaging and effective TTRPG-based educational experiences.

A social approach for remote visits is hybrid visits, where a remote visitor joins a visitor physically present in the museum, allowing simultaneous engagement with its content and collection. Hybrid visits remain relevant post-pandemic, as health or distance may still limit museum access. In this work, we aim to harness the power of cooperative games in the context of a hybrid visit by designing a game-based experience for a museum to enhance sociality and engagement with its collection. We present preliminary evaluation outcomes on how asymmetry may promote sociality and engagement in tandem with informal learning and we conclude with the design implications that will inform the following iterations of our game prototype.

Physics-based hand interaction in VR has been extensively explored, but almost none of the solutions are usable. The only exception is CLAP, a custom soft body simulation offering realistic and smooth hand interaction in VR. Even CLAP, however, imposes constraints on virtual hand and object behavior. We introduce HPTK+, a software solution that utilizes the physics engine NVIDIA PhysX. Benefiting from the engine’s maturity and integration with game engines, we aim to enable more general and free-hand interactions in virtual environments. We conducted a user study with 27 participants comparing the interactions supported by both libraries. Results indicate an overall preference for CLAP, but no significant differences in other measures or performance, except variance. These findings provide insights into the libraries’ suitability for specific tasks. Additionally, we highlight HPTK+’s exclusive support for diverse interactions, positioning it as an ideal candidate for further research in physics-based VR interactions.

Continuous artificial locomotion in VR typically involves users selecting their direction using controller input, with the forward direction determined by the Head, Hands, or less commonly, the Hip. The effects of these different sources on user experience are under-explored, and Feet have not been used as a direction source. To address these gaps, we compared these direction sources, including a novel Feet-based technique. A user study with 22 participants assessed these methods in terms of performance, preference, motion sickness, and sense of presence. Our findings indicate high levels of presence and minimal motion sickness across all methods. Performance differences were noted in one task, where the Head outperformed the Hand. The Hand method was the least preferred, feeling less natural and realistic. The Feet method was found to be more natural than the Head and more realistic than the Hip. This study enhances understanding of direction sources in VR locomotion and introduces Feet-based direction as a viable alternative.

Tabletop role playing games (TTRPGs) offer players the possibility to create and enact the actions of a character in a fictional storyworld. TTRPG are great for immersing players in the game world with proven potential for transformative learning, as they promote perspective taking and a deeper understanding of the storyworld. In this work we aim to explore TTRPGs as an activity supporting the education of history in secondary education, by recording the view of educators on the benefits and challenges of the game. History teachers play a key role in teaching students how to examine historical phenomena and recognize the importance of history in understanding the societies of today. We interviewed 7 educators to explore how they promote historical empathy in their lessons and their views on the potential of TTRPGs as educational tools. Our results indicate a positive outlook by educators regarding the implementation of TTRPGs in the classroom, also discussing challenges such as the use of violence, historical inaccuracy and anachronism. The findings are hopeful in terms of the potential acceptance of the game genre by the teachers and they can be used as the initial step towards guidelines for a TTRPG game design tailored to the needs of secondary education.

Recent work in HCI has explored the use of ICTs for the mobilisation and organisation of values-led communities and social movements. This paper extends this line of work by exploring the design of a communication system for informal, place-based citizen collectives-also referred to as Social Solidarity Movements. The distinctive characteristics of such collectives, namely their decentralised, bottom-up and self-organised organisation, and their lack of monetary resources, pose interesting challenges for communication technology design. The work reported in this paper sought to explore how the values and practices of such collectives can be embodied in mobile communication tools. A system was designed to mirror on-the-ground informal organisational structures, its primary goal being to serve as a probe for research and discussion. Our findings highlight the diversity of channels and organisational structures prevailing in these contexts, their participatory nature, and issues of temporality, anonymity, privacy, and trust, all of which must be considered when designing technologies to support cooperative work. We contribute methodological insights and design implications for mobile technologies underpinning the work of social collectives and their practices.

Virtual grasping is one of the most common and important interactions performed in a Virtual Environment (VE). Even though there has been substantial research using hand tracking methods exploring different ways of visualizing grasping, there are only a few studies that focus on handheld controllers. This gap in research is particularly crucial, since controllers remain the most used input modality in commercial Virtual Reality (VR). Extending existing research, we designed an experiment comparing three different grasping visualizations when users are interacting with virtual objects in immersive VR using controllers. We examine the following visualizations: the Auto-Pose (AP), where the hand is automatically adjusted to the object upon grasping; the Simple-Pose (SP), where the hand closes fully when selecting the object; and the Disappearing-Hand (DH), where the hand becomes invisible after selecting an object, and turns visible again after positioning it on the target. We recruited 38 participants in order to measure if and how their performance, sense of embodiment, and preference are affected. Our results show that while in terms of performance there is almost no significant difference in any of the visualizations, the perceived sense of embodiment is stronger with the AP, and is generally preferred by the users. Thus, this study incentivizes the inclusion of similar visualizations in relevant future research and VR experiences.

Tabletop role playing games (TRPGs) offer players the possibility to create and enact the actions of a character in a fictional game world, guided by a human “game master” (GM). The GM is the storyteller and facilitator who co-creates dynamically the world with the players. In this sense, creativity is a key aspect of TRPGs, both for the players and the GMs, confirmed by a number of existing studies. In this work we focus on the perspective of the GMs on creativity through a user study with 17 participants. They provide feedback on different aspects of creativity as expressed while preparing or executing a story. Our results, among others, highlight the importance of the creative aspects of the game for the GMs as motivation for assuming this role as well as their view of the game as a dynamic co-creation process where the player group dynamics are also a key factor.

Within the broad range of the various types of chatbots, “bots of conviction” (BoCs) shift the focus from offering information to provoking reflection. In this paper we present the design of a “social” BoC, i.e. one designed to engage not one user but a group of participants in reflective dialogue, with the bot and each other. Our social BoC is designed as a digital experience to support history education for high school students (ages 14-18) and was evaluated with a total of 15 teenagers split into 5 groups. The goal was to assess the efficacy of our approach as a tool to promote historical empathy through dialogue. Our findings highlight the BoC's role in engaging the students in constructive dialogue with each other; and the ways in which it guided perspective taking and collective reflection about the past, while at the same time foregrounding connections to the present.

Many studies have been conducted in the past few years that focus on interaction and embodiment in the field of virtual reality. However, despite the recent widespread use and continuing rise of controller-based head-mounted display (HMD) hardware for VR, there is little research on the use of handheld controllers in this context. We explore the effects of different virtual hand representations on interaction and the user’s sense of embodiment, extending the work of Argelaguet et al. in 2016, in this case using controllers. We designed an experiment where users perform the task of selecting and moving a cube from and to specific positions on a table inside an immersive virtual environment, interacting with three representations: the abstract shape of a Sphere, the 3D model of the Controller, and a realistic human-looking Hand. For each representation, users were asked to perform the same task with and without obstacles (Brick Wall, Barbed Wire, Electric Current). Statistical analysis of the results show that although no significant differences were identified in the sense of agency, the users’ performance with the Sphere was significantly worse compared to the other two, and in the case of the positioning task the Controller outperformed the others. Additionally, the Hand generated the strongest sense of ownership, and it was the favorite representation.

Can a chatbot enable us to change our conceptions, to be critically reflective? To what extent can interaction with a technologically 'minimal' medium such as a chatbot evoke emotional engagement in ways that can challenge us to act on the world? In this paper, we discuss the design of a provocative bot, a 'bot of conviction', aimed at triggering conversations on complex topics (e.g. death, wealth distribution, gender equality, privacy) and, ultimately, soliciting specific actions from the user it converses with. We instantiate our design with a use case in the cultural sector, specifically a Neolithic archaeological site that acts as a stage of conversation on such hard themes. Our larger contributions include an interaction framework for bots of conviction, insights gained from an iterative process of participatory design and evaluation, and a vision for bot interaction mechanisms that can apply to the HCI community more widely.

In this paper, we describe the theoretical background, educational design and preliminary evaluation of children's interactions with a set of collaborative full-body digital games, which are set in an informal science education fun park, the Polymechanon. Twelve 10-year olds were observed while interacting in groups with the games, and two of the games were studied closely by interviewing the children. Results indicate that children perceive the rules of the games and the underlying concepts in different ways and the longer they play the more their verbal interactions change from actions-centred to concept-centred.

In this paper, we describe the application of a participatory design methodology with children, developed within the context of an informal educational institution, specifically the National Gallery of Art in Athens, Greece. A group of 11 year-olds spent part of their summer learning about art conservation in order to design an on-line art education program targeted to children of their age. This paper presents the research, design, and prototype development process, and discusses the lessons-learned, challenges, and future possibilities of this methodology with respect to the design of museum education programs and exhibitions.

We describe the development and evaluation of a large-scale multimodal virtual reality simulation suitable for the visualization of cultural heritage sites and architectural planning. The system is demonstrated with a reconstruction of an ancient Greek temple in Messene that was created as part of a EU funded cultural heritage project (CREATE). The system utilizes a CAVE-like theatre consisting of head-tracked user localization, a haptic interface with two arms, and 3D sound. The haptic interface was coupled with a realistic physics engine allowing users to experience and fully appreciate the effort involved in the construction of architectural components and their changes through the ages. Initial user-based studies were carried out, to evaluate the usability and performance of the system. A simple task of stacking blocks was used to compare errors and timing in a haptics-enabled system with a haptics-disabled system. In addition, a qualitative study of the final system took place while it was installed in a museum.

This research sets out to explore children's interaction in immersive Virtual Environments (VEs), focusing on the role and the effect of interactivity on learning and conceptual change. The intention is to examine how interaction and conceptual learning are related in the context of virtual environments developed primarily for informal educational settings. In order to study this, a set of exploratory studies was carried out with children aged 7-12. The children were asked to complete tasks, such as the assembly of ancient columns from parts, which were designed to promote constructivist learning. Their interaction in the VE was analyzed using an Activity Theory framework [3]. The result of this analysis has informed the design of the main studies, which is currently underway.

In this paper we introduce an image-based 3D capture process for the creation and display of photorealistic virtual environments (VEs). The resulting VEs aim to realistically recreate existing real-world scenes that can be displayed in a range of immersive VR systems using a high-quality, view-dependent algorithm and further enhanced using advanced vegetation, shadow display algorithms and 3D sound. The scenes, an archaeological site and an urban environment, were chosen according to real-world applications in the areas of urban planning/architecture and cultural heritage education. The users in each case are able to reconstruct or manipulate elements of the VEs according to their needs, as these have been specified through a detailed user requirements survey. Furthermore, a user task analysis and scenario-based approach has been adopted for the design of the virtual prototypes and the evaluation, which is currently underway. This work is being developed in the context of the EU-funded research project CREATE and the first examples of the prototype system in use are described and demonstrated in this paper.

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The global scope of the CREATE project is to develop a mixed-reality framework that enables highly interactive real-time construction and manipulation of photo-realistic, virtual worlds based on real data sources. This framework will be tested and applied to cultural heritage content in an educational context, as well as to the design and review of architectural/urban planning settings. The evaluation of the project is based on a human-centered, constructivist approach to working and learning, with special attention paid to the evaluation of the resulting mixed reality experience. Through this approach, participants in an activity "construct" their own knowledge by testing ideas and concepts based on their prior knowledge and experience, applying these to a new situation, and integrating the new knowledge gained with pre-existing intellectual constructs. CREATE project uses a high degree of interactivity, and includes provision for other senses (haptics and sound). The application developed in CREATE are designed to run on different platforms, and the targeted running systems are SGI and PC driven, with immersive stereo-displays such as a workbench, a ReaCTor (CAVE-like environment), and a wide projection screen.