With the growing presence of AI-driven avatars in everyday applications, understanding how users perceive and respond to such agents becomes increasingly important. A key open question is whether gaze awareness, an avatar’s ability to react to the gaze of a user, contributes to more natural and socially engaging interaction, particularly on conventional 2D screens. We present a real-time system that integrates live speech recognition, LLM-generated responses, and gaze feedback to enable naturalistic unscripted conversations with a virtual avatar. We conducted a within-subjects study (N = 17) comparing a gaze-aware avatar with a nonreactive baseline. The results of the eye-tracking show that gaze awareness significantly altered user eye movement patterns, increasing mutual gaze episodes, and generating subconscious gaze regulation. Our findings demonstrate that realistic gaze behavior affects user interaction on a subconscious level, even outside immersive environments. We discuss implications for designing future conversational AI systems that foster natural social presence.

Tablets are attractive for design work anywhere, but 3D manipulations are notoriously difficult. We explore how engaging the stylus and multi-touch in concert can render such tasks easier. We introduce Bi-3D, an interaction concept where touch gestures are combined with 2D pen commands for 3D manipulation. For example, for a fast and intuitive 3D drag & drop technique: the pen drags the object on-screen, and parallel pinch-to-zoom moves it in the third dimension. In this paper, we describe the Bi-3D design space, crossing two-handed input and the degrees-of-freedom (DOF) of 3D manipulation and navigation tasks. We demonstrate sketching and manipulation tools in a prototype 3D design application, where users can fluidly combine 3D operations through alternating and parallel use of the modalities. We evaluate the core technique, bi-manual 3DOF input, against widget and mid-air baselines in an object movement task. We find that Bi-3D is a fast and practical way for multi-dimensional manipulation of graphical objects, promising to facilitate 3D design on stylus and tablet devices.