Many virtual reality (VR) applications include functions that require users to move their bodies, such as walking, to control how they move and what they see in the virtual environment. Although studies suggested that physical walking might alleviates VR sickness due to its controllability, this effect occurs only when it is processed as the cause of the visual motion. For example, walking forward can reduce the VR sickness caused by the expanding visual motion. By contrast, in this study, we focus on the effect of physical walking movement on VR sickness caused by visual motion that is not due to the walking. We also investigate the possible reason for this effect. Our results showed that physical walking increases VR sickness, possibly due to people’s increased sensitivity to sensory information from the outside world while walking.

Avatar appearance can influence individuals’ sense of immersion and presence during interactions within virtual reality (VR), which is a core indicator for evaluating immersive VR. This study introduces a novel perspective on avatar design, investigating whether facial similarity and appearance dissimilarity affect self-presence in human–avatar interaction. We conducted a preliminary within-subjects experiment in which each participant, in randomized order, interacted in VR with three avatar types: the actual-self avatar, the ideal-occupational-self avatar, and the different-occupational-self avatar. Results demonstrated that, compared to the different-occupational-self avatar, the actual-self and ideal-occupational-self avatars significantly enhanced perceived Identification, Physical Similarity, and Involvement/Control during interaction. Meanwhile, Natural, Resolution, and Interface Quality remained stable across conditions. These findings suggest that avatar identity cues are primary drivers of self-presence, providing a novel perspective for evaluating avatar design in immersive VR environments.

In this study, we focused on one-to-many remote collaboration which requires more mental resources from the remote instructor than the case of one-to-one since it is "multitasking". The main contribution of our study is that we assessed instructor’s capacity in one-to-many AR remote instruction giving both subjectively and objectively. We compared the remote instructor’s workload while interacting with a different number of local workers, assuming tasks at an industrial site. The results showed that the instructors perceived stronger workload and the communication quality became lower when interacting with multiple local workers. Based on the results, we discussed how to support the remote instructor in a one-to-many AR remote collaboration.

In this paper, we compared three different types of avatar design (“Body”, “Hand + Arm”, and “Hand only”) for the augmented reality remote instruction system in terms of usability. The result showed that the usability of the remote instruction system with full body avatar has a higher usability. In addition, participants felt more easily to track the full body avatar than the avatar with hand only. However, concerning the understandability of the instruction, there was no difference between three designs.

We propose to artificially manipulate participants' vocal cues, amplitude and frequency, in real time to adjust their dominance and persuasiveness during audio conferences. We implemented a prototype system and conducted two experiments. The first experiment investigated the effect of vocal cue manipulation on the perception of dominance. The results showed that participants perceived higher dominance while listening to a voice with a high amplitude and low frequency. The second experiment investigated the effect of vocal cue manipulation on persuasiveness. The results indicated that a person with a low amplitude and low frequency voice had greater persuasiveness in conversations with biased dominance, while there was no statistically significant difference in persuasiveness in conversations with unbiased dominance.

To accomplish collaborative work, collaborators need to know one another's states of work for coordination. Similarly, in situations of knowledge transfer where experts need to instruct novices by passing implicit knowledge and personal experience about the task, one challenge lies in the knowledge gap between experts and novices. Both parties need to gain an awareness of each other's state of task knowledge for effective knowledge transfer. In this paper, we aim to investigate how online knowledge transfer is supported by a design called knowledge transparency of a shared document workspace, which allows explicitly annotating and sharing ones' knowledge state to make it visible to their collaborators. We conducted a laboratory study to examine how knowledge transparency affects knowledge transfer among experts and novices using an image editing task over an online document. The results shed light on how to support knowledge co-construction and communication for the purpose of knowledge transfer through interface design.