In this paper, we present foundations of the Socio-physical Model of Activities (SOMA). SOMA represents both the physical as well as the social context of everyday activities. Such tasks seem to be trivial for humans, however, they pose severe problems for artificial agents. For starters, a natural language command requesting something will leave many pieces of information necessary for performing the task unspecified. Humans can solve such problems fast as we reduce the search space by recourse to prior knowledge such as a connected collection of plans that describe how certain goals can be achieved at various levels of abstraction. Rather than enumerating fine-grained physical contexts SOMA sets out to include socially constructed knowledge about the functions of actions to achieve a variety of goals or the roles objects can play in a given situation. As the human cognition system is capable of generalizing experiences into abstract knowledge pieces applicable to novel situations, we argue that both physical and social context need be modeled to tackle these challenges in a general manner. The central contribution of this work, therefore, lies in a comprehensive model connecting physical and social entities, that enables flexibility of executions by the robotic agents via symbolic reasoning with the model. This is, by and large, facilitated by the link between the physical and social context in SOMA where relationships are established between occurrences and generalizations of them, which has been demonstrated in several use cases in the domain of everyday activites that validate SOMA.

Questionnaires are among the most common research tools in virtual reality (VR) user studies. Transitioning from virtuality to reality for giving self-reports on VR experiences can lead to systematic biases. VR allows to embed questionnaires into the virtual environment which may ease participation and avoid biases. To provide a cohesive picture of methods and design choices for questionnaires in VR (inVRQ), we discuss 15 inVRQ studies from the literature and present a survey with 67 VR experts from academia and industry. Based on the outcomes, we conducted two user studies in which we tested different presentation and interaction methods of inVRQs and evaluated the usability and practicality of our design. We observed comparable completion times between inVRQs and questionnaires outside VR (nonVRQs) with higher enjoyment but lower usability for \inVRQs. These findings advocate the application of inVRQs and provide an overview of methods and considerations that lay the groundwork for inVRQ design.

Questionnaires are among the most common research tools in virtual reality (VR) evaluations and user studies. However, transitioning from virtual worlds to the physical world to respond to VR experience questionnaires can potentially lead to systematic biases. Administering questionnaires in VR (inVRQs) is becoming more common in contemporary research. This is based on the intuitive notion that inVRQs may ease participation, reduce the Break in Presence (BIP) and avoid biases. In this paper, we perform a systematic investigation into the effects of interrupting the VR experience through questionnaires using physiological data as a continuous and objective measure of presence. In a user study (n=50), we evaluated question-asking procedures using a VR shooter with two different levels of immersion. The users rated their player experience with a questionnaire either inside or outside of VR. Our results indicate a reduced BIP for the employed inVRQ without affecting the self-reported player experience.