We conducted a co-design study with 26 users in dyadic groups who were assigned to the opposing roles of "Streamers'' and "Viewers'' to design interactive, wearable telepresence prototypes for interpersonal use. The goal was to elicit values, identify value tensions, and resolve these tensions in the design of a system that allows Streamers to share their live experiences with a remote Viewer. Leveraging the lens of value-sensitive design (VSD), we found that these different stakeholders prioritized different values in design, but possibly due to our prompt to design for someone they cared about/knew, often accounted for one another's needs in their solutions to arrive at designs that were affordable, unobtrusive, and socially acceptable for the Streamer, while giving the Viewer a sense of autonomy. Our work highlights the strengths of co-design when eliciting important human values in the design of sociotechnical systems for wearable telepresence, reconciling value tensions, and conceptualizing novel hardware- and software-based solutions for enhancing the interpersonal telepresence experience of both viewers and streamers. A key insight from our study is that no single system will meet all users' needs; therefore, we should move towards building customizable toolkits to account for differing values and needs.

We performed a mixed-design study with 56 participants to compare the effect of horizontal FOV (hfov) and vertical FOV (vfov) on egocentric distance perception in four different realistic virtual environments (VEs). We also compared VE attributes of indoor/outdoor and cluttered/uncluttered. The participants blind-walked towards four different targets at 3m, 4m, 5m, and 6m distance while wearing a backpack computer and a wide FOV head-mounted display (HMD). The combinations of 165°, 110° and 45° hfovs, and 110° and 35° vfovs was simulated in the same HMD. The results indicated more accurate distance judgement with larger hfov with no significant effect of vfov. More accurate distance judgement in indoor VEs compared to outdoor VEs was observed. Also, participants judged distances more accurately in cluttered environments versus uncluttered environments. These results highlight that the environment is important in distance-critical VR applications and wider hfov should be considered for an improved distance judgment.

In recent years, pass-through cameras have resurfaced as inclusions for virtual reality (VR) hardware. With modern cameras that now have increased resolution and frame rate, Video See-Through (VST) Head-Mounted Displays (HMD) can be used to provide an Augmented Reality (AR) experience. However, because users see their surroundings through video capture and HMD lenses, there is question surrounding how people perceive their environment with these devices. We conducted a user study with 26 participants to help understand if distance perception is altered when viewing surroundings with a VST HMD. Although previous work shows that distance estimation in VR with an HTC Vive is comparable to that in the real world, our results show that the inclusion of a ZED Mini pass-through camera causes a significant difference between normal, unrestricted viewing and that through a VST HMD.