Extended reality (XR) technologies offer significant potential to create immersive virtual companionship experiences that support social connection, emotional engagement, and everyday practical needs. However, little is known about how people envision day-to-day interactions with virtual companions in XR environments, raising questions about how they should be designed. To address this gap, we conducted speculative design workshops with 16 participants experienced in AI and XR, generating 16 diverse design concepts spanning varied contexts, use cases and XR-specific affordances. Our analysis reveals key opportunities and emerging challenges in designing virtual companions for immersive environments, demonstrating how they foster meaningful companionship while supporting everyday activities. We further uncover a social tension around companions’ embodied presence and visibility in shared spaces: users often prefer private, controllable interactions (engaging with a companion only they can see), which can conflict with social norms, create ambiguity for bystanders, or result in missing context during co-present interactions.

Buildings, which people encounter continuously in their day-to-day life, are a compelling target for augmented reality (AR), being fixed, static structures often with plain, flat surfaces to use as potential canvases for AR content. We present a user study (n=15) where participants described how they would augment a Brutalist building they see/use often with AR content. Our results show a willingness to augment the building aesthetically and functionally We identify preliminary insights on where augmentations on buildings are preferred to be made, i.e. targeting flat, empty surfaces and the roof, avoiding windows and entrances.

Augmented reality (AR) can aid individuals during complex, time sensitive tasks like cooking. To explore AR’s use within the kitchen we conducted an interview study (N=17) and identified time management, due to the constraints of single-device timers such as smartphones, as a challenge whilst cooking which AR could address. We conducted a user study (N=14) comparing an AR spatial timer, which allows multiple instances of timers to be positioned within a culinary environment, with a single device timer for workload perception and time management efficiency. Our results show spatial-timers can assist users by making it easier to check remaining time for specific kitchen station, and can more effectively draw attention to stations, but overall workload did not improve.

Streaming services do not present options neutrally. Less metadata is presented today than at the advent of streaming video, e.g. with user and critic ratings routinely hidden, inhibiting informed user choices. Our work combines Augmented Reality and Diminished Reality to explore meta-interfaces that augment TV movie browsing with additional information and perceptual filtering. We present MovieMetaViewer an AR extension for movie streaming UIs which augments streaming-service browsing with independent metadata and optional perceptual filtering. We aim to determine if such meta-interfaces are helpful during media browsing, and whether diminished reality or other visual effects can improve the browsing experience by ensuring viewers only perceive movies meeting their filtering criteria.

With augmented reality (AR) soon expected become part of our everyday lives there is a pertinent need to consider how it should be used within social settings. We explore individuals’ inclinations towards incorporating AR into small group social interactions across a diverse range of settings. Through six speculative design focus groups involving 21 participants, 100 ideas were generated across three scenarios: living room settings (public – sociopetal), public transport seating (semi-public – mixed proxemics), and crowded public spaces (public – sociofugal). We discuss the challenges being addressed through the proposed social AR designs, ranging from functional use cases around conveying shared information and supporting group cohesion, to addressing boredom, to facilitating shared imagination.

Cultural differences influence how cyclists and drivers interact, affecting global autonomous vehicle (AV) adoption. AV-cyclist interfaces are needed to clarify AV intentions and resolve ambiguities when no human driver is present. These must adapt across cultures and road infrastructure. We conducted the first cross-cultural AV-cyclist user study across Stockholm (high segregation of cyclists from drivers), Glasgow (some segregation), and Muscat (no segregation). Cyclists used an AR simulator to cycle in physical space and experienced three holistic AV-cyclist interfaces. These integrated multiple interfaces into a larger ecosystem, e.g., a smartwatch synchronised with on-vehicle eHMI. Interfaces communicated AV location, intentions, or both. Riders from all cities preferred combined AV location and intention information but used it differently. Stockholm cyclists focused on location, validating intentions with driving behaviour. Glasgow riders valued both cues equally. Muscat cyclists trusted interfaces, prioritising intentions without relying on driving behaviour. These insights are key for global AV adoption.

AR/VR use in-transit is increasing due to the advantages it provides over more limited mobile and seatback displays for work and play. However, despite the now common support for “travel mode” in consumer XR headsets such as the Meta Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro, little is known about how this emergent technology has been used in-practice by passengers - from why and how they use it, to what real-world challenges they face during usage in these very public, shared contexts. To address this gap, we contribute a novel large scale analysis of Reddit posts discussing first-hand use of VR/AR in-transit. We captured 11,150 posts, producing 437 user accounts which were synthesized into themes in relation to: in-the-wild use of immersive devices, users' positive/negative sentiment about usage, challenges they faced, and social interactions and impediments that occurred. Our snapshot of the current reality of passenger XR provides real-world insight evidencing the need for more passenger-centric designs of spatial interfaces, interaction techniques, and reality awareness.

Jumping is an engaging physical activity bounded by individual physical capabilities. However in Virtual Reality (VR) we can apply perceptual manipulations like translational gain to real jumps, amplifying the user's apparent capabilities - jumping higher and further than is possible in reality. Prior work has focused on imperceptible gains, but this greatly limits the range of available experiences users can engage in, and designers can create. Research outside of jumping has shown that higher, clearly noticeable gains can still be comfortable, engaging and usable in VR. Therefore, in this paper, we evaluate ($\mathrm{N}=18$) the maximal comfortable gain applied to three jump types: forward, vertical, and sideways. We found, for the majority of participants, high gains ($>100 \mathrm{x}$) are not only comfortable but made users feel enhanced whilst retaining jump ownership, deriving guidelines on the extent to which we can amplify real jumps to feel superhuman in virtuality.

The spatial flexibility of Extended Reality (XR) allows for personalized, context-aware organization of applications aligned with a user’s tasks and priorities. Notifications play a crucial role here, e.g., informing users of received messages they might otherwise miss. However, questions remain around how attention-grabbing they should be, how much information they should present, and how the presentation should adapt to the message’s context and content. While prior studies examined facets of message notification design, the impact of multimodal notifications and how they could be used holistically to support message awareness has not yet been explored. We address this by evaluating nine audio-visual notifications, investigating usability, interruptibility, preferences, and their use to inform of received messages. Our results show differing effects of multimodal notification designs and that individuals want notification modality and design to vary based on delivered message content. These results offer new insights into developing context-aware multimodal interaction strategies for spatial notifica¬tions and XR messaging.

Harassment in Social Virtual Reality (SVR) is a growing concern. The current SVR landscape features inconsistent access to non-standardised safety features, with minimal empirical evidence on their real-world effectiveness, usage and impact. We examine the use and effectiveness of safety tools across 12 popular SVR platforms by surveying 100 users about their experiences of different types of harassment and their use of features like muting, blocking, personal spaces and safety gestures. While harassment remained common-including hate speech, virtual stalking, and physical harassment-many find safety features insufficient or inconsistently applied. Reactive tools like muting and blocking are widely used, largely driven by users' familiarity from other platforms. Safety tools are also used to proactively curate individual virtual experiences, protecting users from harassment, but inadvertently leading to fragmented social spaces. We advocate for standardising proactive, rather than reactive, anti-harassment tools across platforms, and present insights into future safety feature development.

Virtual reality (VR) users are often around bystanders, i.e. people in the real world the VR user may want to interact with. To facilitate bystander-VR user interactions, technology-mediated awareness systems have been introduced to increase a user’s awareness of bystanders. However, while prior works have found effective means of facilitating bystander-VR user interactions, it is unclear when and why one awareness system should be used over another. We reviewed, and selected, a breadth of bystander awareness systems from the literature and investigated their usability, and how they could be holistically used together to support varying awareness needs across 14 bystander-VR user interactions. Our results demonstrate VR users do not manage bystander awareness based solely on the usability of awareness systems but rather on the demands of social context weighted against desired immersion in VR (something existing evaluations fail to capture) and show the need for socially intelligent bystander awareness systems.

Everyday Augmented Reality (AR) displays, with wearable, fashionable, all-day form factors, may one day supplant our reliance on physical displays, heralding new capabilities in augmented intelligence and perception, communication, productivity, and more. Such technology has the potential to become as fundamental to our daily lives as smartphones are today, empowering users, communities, business, governments, and others to alter, augment, diminish or otherwise mediate our perception of reality. For social good, this technology can enable augmenting expression of social identity to better represent our ‘authentic’ self, and virtually enhancing real-world social spaces to encourage greater community ownership and social cohesion. For social harm however, everyday AR could facilitate and amplify manipulation, information disorder (e.g. dis-information), censorship and coercion in our day-to-day experience of reality. In this essay, we consider some of the key societal changes (and ethical challenges) posed by the adoption of everyday AR, and argue that everyday AR will provoke the need for new human rights to be considered alongside proposed neurorights and existing and envisaged digital human rights, around: who can mediate reality (perceptual autonomy); what elements of reality are permissible to alter/augment (perceptual agency); and governing permissible intent regarding why we augment the user’s perception of reality, in particular considering tensions in cognitive autonomy (e.g. manipulation) and perceptual integrity (e.g. information disorder).

Social virtual reality (VR) will potentially change online communities, transforming how people meet, interact, and socialise online. However, issues surrounding the growing threat of harassment (from verbal to cyber-physical assault) posed within social VR platforms are increasingly being noted within research.Yet, while prior research has successfully captured singular qualitative insights (e.g. identifying individual types of harassment or target user groups) it is essential that systems be developed to monitor emergent threats to community cohesion, including harassment, in a platform independent manner. In this paper, we explore whether user reviews are a valid and useful source of data around harassment incidences in social VR, a crucial first step towards platform agnostic, large scale and longitudinal monitoring of emerging harassment in social VR communities through user reviews posted about social VR applications.. We analysed 1000 user reviews posted on the Meta Quest store page for the social VR platform Rec Room and found 114 reviews report experiencing and/or witnessing harassment during use. Our results establish the validity of analysing user reviews as a means of monitoring harassment in social VR communities and we close by discussing their use in large scale, longitudinal monitoring systems.

Mass adoption of Everyday Augmented Reality (AR) glasses will enable pervasive augmentation of our expression of social identity through AR filters, transforming our perception of self and others. However, despite filters’ prominent and often problematic usage in social media, research has yet to reflect on the potential impact AR filters might have when brought into everyday life. Informed by our survey of 300 existing popular AR filters used on Snapchat, Instagram and Tiktok, we conducted an AR-in-VR user study where participants (N=24) were exposed to 18 filters across six categories. We evaluated the social acceptability of these augmentations around others and attitudes towards an individual’s augmented self.Our findings highlight 1) how users broadly respected another individual’s augmented self; 2) positive use cases, such as supporting the presentation of gender identity; and 3) tensions around applying AR filters to others (e.g. censorship, changing protected characteristics) and their impact on self-perception (e.g. perpetuating unrealistic beauty standards). We raise questions regarding the rights of individuals to augment and be augmented that provoke the need for further consideration of AR augmentations in society.

Evaluating interactive systems often requires researchers to invite user study participants to the lab. However, corresponding evaluations often lack realism and participants are usually recruited from a local area only. In this work, we propose Remote Virtual Reality for simulating Real-world Research (RVR3) to evaluate novel real-world authentication prototypes. A user study (N=25) demonstrates the feasibility of using VR for remote usability research on simulated real-world prototypes. Our remote VR user study provides a glimpse into the usability and social acceptability of two novel authentication systems: Hand Menu and Tap. We build on prior research in this space and discuss the impact RVR3 studies have on the range of possible studies. In summary, our remote VR research method to design, implement, and evaluate interactive real-world prototypes is a next step towards moving human-centred research out of the lab and potentially reaching a more diverse and larger participant sample over time.

Despite recent work investigating how VR users can be made aware of bystanders, few have explored how bystander-VR user interactions may be facilitated by, for example, increasing the user’s auditory awareness so they can better converse with bystanders. Through a lab study (N=15) we investigated 4 approaches of manipulating in-VR audio to facilitate verbal interactions between a VR user and bystander: (1) dynamically reducing application volume, (2) removing background audio, (3) removing sound effects and (4) removing all audio. Our results show audio manipulations can be used to significantly improve a VR user’s auditory awareness at the cost of reducing sense of presence in VR. They also show most preferred increased awareness be balanced with decreased presence in VR, however, they also identify a subset of participants who prioritised increasing awareness no matter the cost to presence.

Behaviour in virtual environments might be informed by our experiences in physical environments, but virtual environments are not constrained by the same physical, perceptual, or social cues. Instead of replicating the properties of physical spaces, one can create virtual experiences that diverge from reality by dynamically manipulating environmental, aural, and social properties. This paper explores digital proxemics, which describe how we use space in virtual environments and how the presence of others influences our behaviours, interactions, and movements. First, we frame the open challenges of digital proxemics in terms of activity, social signals, audio design, and environment. We explore a subset of these challenges through an evaluation that compares two audio designs and two displays with different social signal affordances: head-mounted display (HMD) versus desktop PC. We use quantitative methods using instrumented tracking to analyse behaviour, demonstrating how personal space, proximity, and attention compare between desktop PC and HMDs.

The occlusive nature of VR headsets introduces significant barriers to a user’s awareness of their surrounding reality. While recent research has explored systems to facilitate a VR user’s interactions with nearby people, objects, etc, we lack a fundamental understanding of user attitudes towards and expectations of these systems. We present the results of a card sorting study (N=14) which investigated attitudes towards increasing a VR user’s reality awareness (awareness of people, objects, audio, pets, and systems to manage and moderate personal usage) whilst in VR. Our results confirm VR headsets should be equipped with systems to increase a user’s awareness of reality. However, opinions vary on how increased awareness should be achieved as our results also highlight differing expectations regarding: persistent vs temporary notification design, notification content and when, why and how awareness should be increased.

Given the difficulties of studying the shoulder surfing resistance of authentication systems in a live setting, researchers often ask study participants to shoulder surf authentications by watching two-dimensional (2D) video recordings of a user authenticating. How-ever, these video recordings do not provide participants with a realistic shoulder surfing experience, creating uncertainty in the value and validity of lab-based shoulder surfing experiments. In this work, we exploit the unique characteristics of virtual reality (VR) and study the use of non-immersive/immersive VR recordings for shoulder surfing research. We conducted a user study (N=18) to explore the strengths and weaknesses of such a VR-based shoulder surfing research approach. Our results suggest that immersive VR observations result in a more realistic shoulder surfing experience, in a significantly higher sense of being part of the authentication environment, in a greater feeling of spatial presence, and in a higher level of involvement than 2D video observations without impacting participants’ observation performance. This suggests that studying shoulder surfing in VR is advantageous in many ways compared to currently used approaches, e.g., participants can freely choose their observation angle rather than being limited to a fixed observation angle as done in current methods. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of using VR for shoulder surfing research and conclude with four recommendations to help researchers decide when (and when not) to employ VR for shoulder surfing research in the authentication research domain.

VR users and bystanders must sometimes interact, but our understanding of these interactions - their purpose, how they are accomplished, attitudes toward them, and where they break down - is limited. This current gap inhibits research into managing or supporting these interactions, and preventing unwanted or abusive activity. We present the results of the first survey (N=100) that investigates stories of actual emergent in-the-wild interactions between VR users and bystanders. Our analysis indicates VR user and bystander interactions can be categorised into one of three categories: coexisting, demoing, and interrupting. We highlight common interaction patterns and impediments encountered during these interactions. Bystanders play an important role in moderating the VR user’s experience, for example intervening to save the VR user from potential harm. However, our stories also suggest that the occlusive nature of VR introduces the potential for bystanders to exploit the vulnerable state of the VR user; and for the VR user to exploit the bystander for enhanced immersion, introducing significant ethical concerns.

Dynamic personal data based on a user’s activity, such as recent visited physical locations, browsing history, and call logs, update frequently, making it a promising token for user authentication. However, it is not clear how users perceive this use of personal data and which data types are most suitable for authentication. To investigate this, we conducted an online survey with N=100 participants. For 10 personal data types we asked participants about their comfort with this data for authentication, its perceived security, its impact on behaviour, who has access to it, how frequently it updates, and how memorable they perceive it to be. We found that participants were generally uncomfortable with personal data being used for authentication and, knowing their personal data is used, they may intentionally change their behaviour due to privacy concerns. We discuss the benefits and drawbacks of using personal data as a source of dynamic tokens to complement authentication and conclude with three learned lessons.