Extensive research has examined presence and basic psychological needs (drawing on Self-Determination Theory) in digital media. While prior work offers hints of potential connections, we lack a systematic account of whether and how distinct presence dimensions map onto the basic needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. We surveyed 301 social VR users and analyzed using Structural Equation Modeling. Results show that social presence predicts all three needs, while self-presence predicts competence and relatedness, and spatial presence shows no direct or moderating effects. Gender and age moderated these relationships: women benefited more from social presence for autonomy and relatedness, men from self- and spatial presence for competence and autonomy, and younger users showed stronger associations between social presence and relatedness, and between self-presence and autonomy. These findings position presence as a motivational mechanism shaped by demographic factors. The results offer theoretical insights and practical implications for designing inclusive, need-supportive multiuser VR environments.

The sense of presence is central to immersive experiences in Virtual Reality (VR), and particularly salient in socially rich platforms like social VR. While prior studies have explored various aspects related to presence, less is known about how ongoing usage behaviors shape presence in everyday engagement. To address this gap, we examine whether usage intensity, captured through frequency of use, session duration, and years of VR experience, predicts presence in social VR. A survey of 295 users assessed overall, social, spatial, and self-presence using validated scales. Results show that both frequency and duration consistently predict higher presence across all dimensions, with interaction effects indicating that frequent and extended sessions synergistically amplify the experience of “being there.” These effects were stable across age and gender. Our findings extend presence research beyond the laboratory by identifying behavioral predictors in social VR and offer insights for building inclusive environments that reliably foster presence.

In social Virtual Reality (VR), particularly within VRChat, a significant group of users often referred to as "mutes" refrain from voice communication. This study analyzes 4212 discussion entries, including both original submissions and comments, from the r/VRchat subreddit to explore the experiences and reasons behind this practice. Our findings indicate that muteness is an integral aspect of social VR culture, yet mute users face challenges, including exposure to abusive behaviors and communication barriers in a fast-paced environment. Factors of social VR like harassment, heightened social anxiety from the immersive presence, and the complexities of identity management can discourage voice communication, leading many to adopt "muteness" as a response. This behavior can be seen within the broader context of social disability, challenging normative communication assumptions. We highlight the risks of generalizing marginalized communities and emphasize the need for further research to address and support the unique needs of these groups in social VR spaces.

LLM-based embodied agents are recently emerging in VR, supporting various scenarios such as pedagogical assistants, virtual companions, and NPCs for games. These agents hold potential to enhance user interactions but require thoughtful design to cater diverse user needs and contexts. We present an architecture that leverages different LLM modules to enable conversational interactions with an embodied agent in multi-user VR. Our system’s primary goal is to facilitate immersive tailoring through conversational input, allowing users to dynamically adjust an agent’s behavior and properties (e.g., role, personality, and appearance), directly within the virtual space, rather than during development or via separate interfaces. We evaluate the system’s performance, measuring latency during tailoring tasks, and share insights from a six-week study involving five users exploring various scenarios. While the approach shows promise, challenges remain, including reducing latency in the speech-to-text-to-speech pipeline and addressing the black-box limitations of LLMs, highlighting areas for future research.

In social Virtual Reality (VR) environments, the significant trend of 'mirror dwellers,' users who often use virtual mirrors to engage with their avatars, has emerged. This study examines discussions from r/VRchat to explore the reasons for this behavior and how it is perceived within the broader community. Our findings highlight the critical role of mirrors in compensating for the sensory limitations of VR, particularly the lack of physical feedback. Users often turn to mirrors to view parts of their avatar that are not accessible from a first-person perspective. Additionally, our research uncovers that a limited Field-Of-View (FOV) hinders the development of a strong connection between users and their avatars, further driving the need for mirrors. However, while using mirrors to mitigate FOV and physical feedback limitations can be helpful, it may also disrupt social interaction in VR environments, as the excessive reliance on mirrors can hinder the social experience in VR for others. This research deepens our understanding of user behavior in social VR and provides insights that could guide future design improvements to enrich the overall user experience.

The paper summarizes the contributions to the AVI 2024 workshop on Prototyping and Developing Real-World Applications of Extended Reality.

Drinking in social VR has become popular, yet little is known about how users perceive and experience alcohol consumption while immersed in virtual spaces with others, as well as its potential harm and negative effects on their offline and online lives. To better understand this emerging phenomenon from the perspective of both drinkers and non-drinkers, we analyzed public discussions from the r/VRchat online community on users’ perceptions, and experiences with alcohol consumption in social VR. Heavy drinking is prevalent. We find that VR drinkers feel less intoxicated, which makes them drink more without being aware of it. Anti-cybersickness designs may affect users’ perception of vertigo, even if the vertigo is not caused by VR. We discuss how affordances that support meaningful activities (i.e., sense of presence, embodiment, and social interactions) exacerbate alcohol abuse. We propose implications for the design of safer social VR experiences for both drinkers and non-drinkers.

Extended Reality (XR) technology offers promising results to support skill training. In the field of surgical education, Virtual Reality (VR) has long been explored, showing the potential to foster improved skill development and learning. However, XR in this domain is still underinvestigated, and there is a lack of design knowledge, design methods, and guidelines to inform how to best design XR experiences for effective surgical training. Here, we focus on suture training and show how participatory embodied design activities with experienced surgeons can help open the design space and arrive at interesting design solutions. We report on a hybrid bodystorming combining physical props with XR headsets with passthrough capabilities, supporting rich embodied explorations, a better understanding and articulation of key steps of suturing, uncovering essential design requirements and features, and arriving at an interesting design concept proposal that can be inspiring for future works in the domain.

Abstract Cross-reality media technology creates alternate reality experiences in which the physical and the virtual world are interconnected and influence each other through a network of sensors and actuators. Despite technological advances, the landscape of cross-reality technology as an enabler of alternate reality educational experiences has not been explored yet. The technical expertise required to set up and program such mixed environments is too high to engage the problem owners (i.e. educational experts) in the design process and, hence, user-driven innovation remains challenging. In this paper we explore the co-creation of cross-reality experiences for educational games. We created a no-programming toolkit that provides a visual language and interface abstractions to quickly build prototypes of cross-reality interactions. The toolkit supports experience prototyping and allows designers to coproduce, with educational experts, meaningful scenarios while they create, try out and reconfigure their prototypes. We report on a workshop with 36 educators where the toolkit was used to ideate cross-reality games for education. We discuss use cases of game-based learning applications developed by the participants that follow different pedagogical strategies and combine different physical and virtual spaces and times. We outline implications for the design of cross-reality interactions in educational settings that trigger further research and technological developments.

A novel participatory livestreaming genre, Avatar Collective Streaming, is gaining traction. Beyond traditional audience participation mechanisms, such as chat messages or commands, these livestreams allow viewers to join, socially interact, and participate through avatars in a software-driven virtual scenario without requiring the presence of a human streamer. From observations of livestreaming sessions and interviews with regular users (n=23), we define the main features of this novel form of livestreaming and we analyze what makes it engaging for participants, as well as factors that limit the user experience. The use of avatars affords a strong sense of presence and participation, and together with the absence of a streamer, it shapes new forms of sociability, being together, and belonging. Challenges include repetitive content and overcrowding. We provide design implications for synchronous collective participation scenarios and opportunities for software-driven content generation.

Immersive technologies such as Augmented Reality afford to enrich the physical environment with a layer of digital information, providing new experiences that can support and improve the daily life of people in their homes. We present insights from a field study with nine families to understand user experience and expectations of Mobile Augmented Reality at home and reveal emerging designs. We deployed a mobile application that provided a contextual representation of the WiFi signal through visualizations integrated in the physical space. Each family lived with the prototype for one week, with a pre- and post-study interview session. We found that Augmented Reality has potential to (1) foster people's autonomy and control (e.g., configuration of technology and problem solving), as well as (2) enhance people's knowledge and awareness about domestic technology (e.g., understanding technical terms and awareness of invisible infrastructures).

Standalone Head-Mounted Displays open up new possibilities to study full-room, bodily interactions in immersive environments. User studies with these devices, however, are complex to design, setup and run, since remote access is required to track the user view and actions, detect errors and perform adjustments during experimental sessions. We designed IXCI as a research support tool to streamline immersive user studies by explicitly addressing these issues. Through a use case, we show how the tool effectively supports the researcher in tasks such as remote debugging, rapid prototyping, run-time parameter configuration, monitoring participants’ progress, providing help to users, recovering from errors and minimizing data loss.

End-user-programmable smart-home toolkits have engendered excitement in recent years. However, modern homes already cater quite well to users’ needs, and genuinely new needs for smart-home automation seldom arise. Acknowledging this challenging starting point, we conducted a six-week in-the-wild study of smart-home toolkits with four carefully recruited technology-savvy families. Interleaved with free toolkit use in the home were several creativity workshops to facilitate ideation and programming. We evaluated use experiences at the end of the six weeks. Even with extensive facilitation, families faced difficulties in identifying needs for smart-home automation, except for social needs that emerged in all the families. We present analysis of those needs and discuss how end-user-programmable toolkits could better engage with both those household members who design new automated functions and those who merely ‘use’ them.

Building an electronic circuit is an error-prone activity for novice users; many errors can occur, such as incorrect wirings or wrong component values. This work explores the use of Augmented Reality (AR) as a technology to mitigate the issues that arise when users construct circuits. We present a study that investigates the effectiveness, usability, and cognitive load of AR visual instructions for circuit prototyping tasks. A mobile-based, window-on-the-world AR tool is compared to traditional media such as paper-based or monitor-displayed electronic drawings. Results show that superimposing components and instructions through AR reduces the number of errors, allows users to easily troubleshoot them and reduces users' mental workload.

Building physical spaces interconnected with virtual worlds is a complex task that requires high technical knowledge and hours of programming and, as a matter of fact, is relegated to the work of expert professionals. The goal of this research is to lower the development threshold through the design of an end-user toolkit that provides a visual integrated environment for the rapid prototyping of cross-reality interactions. A user study with 8 participants showed the effectiveness of our approach and uncovered design opportunities and challenges for supporting the development of cross-reality environments.

Recent technology advances support the interconnection of smart objects, enabling their communication according to the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. IoT is promising important changes in our lives. The opportunities offered by such technologies can be amplified, by investigating new approaches that, thanks to high-level abstractions, can enable non-expert users to compose data and functionality of things, as well as the communication among them, by means of "natural" composition paradigm. Today, in fact, this is a prerogative almost always reserved to developers who, through the use of specific programming languages, provide pre-packaged solutions to users. The workshop aims at stressing the Human-Computer Interaction perspective, i.e., it acknowledges the importance of enabling even non-technical users to manipulate data and functionality of things in a simple and natural way.

TEI researchers/designers are often discouraged from building complex interactive environments by the requirement of high technical knowledge. In this studio/workshop, we present the ROSS Toolkit that offers tools to abstract/automate low-level programming of technical details, thereby simplifying the design and programming of interactions between heterogeneous networked devices. Participants will be first introduced to the toolkit functionality to cope with different technical issues. In a second part, they will experiment with the toolkit by developing use cases of increasing complexity that will involve off-the-shelf devices, interactive surfaces, and custom-made tangible artifacts. We expect participants to learn what are the opportunities and challenges for the development of responsive and interactive environments.

The use of dedicated devices may insufficiently support the variety and subtlety of domestic arrangements: they usually focus on specific aspects (e.g., home automation, health, safety, etc.) and potentially become obsolete, since they are unable to be recomposed and adapted to the needs of new situations. Open-ended and repurposable technologies could better address domestic users' needs. We present T4Tags 2.0, an open-ended toolkit for programming tangible tokens that embed different sensing technologies and can be attached to ordinary objects to create smart behaviors at home. We report findings from a one-day workshop we carried out to explore opportunities of the toolkit.

Exploratory search confront users with challenges in expressing search intents as the current search interfaces require investigating result listings to identify search directions, iterative typing, and reformulating queries. We present the design of Exploration Wall, a touch-based search user interface that allows incremental exploration and sense-making of large information spaces by combining entity search, flexible use of result entities as query parameters, and spatial configuration of search streams that are visualized for interaction. Entities can be flexibly reused to modify and create new search streams, and manipulated to inspect their relationships with other entities. Data comprising of task-based experiments comparing Exploration Wall with conventional search user interface indicate that Exploration Wall achieves significantly improved recall for exploratory search tasks while preserving precision. Subjective feedback supports our design choices and indicates improved user satisfaction and engagement. Our findings can help to design user interfaces that can effectively support exploratory search on touch devices.

The tremendous amount of different input devices and interactive environments envisioned by researchers produces a severe challenge for the development of ubiquitous interaction. Toolkits that support the rapid setup of ubiquitous environments reduce the effort in arranging the technological medium and have the potential to lower prerequisite knowledge and automate low-level programming tasks. In this paper, we present our work-in-progress approach: a toolkit that combines physical and digital components into a unique environment to allow the rapid setup of device ecologies.

In this working paper we present the design and setup of a workshop environment that empowers users with tools to create and share digital narratives associated with physical artifacts. The approach focuses on two main design choices: (1) physical embodiment, by having people directly interact with the physical objects we want to augment and, (2) situated social interactions, by offering the possibility to share personal ideas and comment on others, to collaboratively produce stories about augmented objects. We also report about the main evaluation results we got in a workshop in which we studied users needs with respect to tangible interactive experiences in exhibitions of museums.

The design of the user interfaces for educational games (EGs) poses specific challenges, as this feature does not only have an impact on the game playability but can also be used to reinforce learning or to establish associations between concepts. However, implementing advanced in-game interactions can be an issue due to the wide range of technologies for defining input modalities, actions and events that game designers need to consider. In this working paper, we propose an approach to ease the development of educational games that go one step beyond classical mouse and keyboard interaction and provide interaction alternatives within the same game rationale. Our proposal is based on the integration of a game design model and an ubicomp interaction toolkit that manages heterogeneous devices.

This Studio will involve participants creating interactions with physical and digital elements. They will have the opportunity to use a toolkit we developed that combines physical and digital widgets into a unique environment to allow the rapid setup of device ecologies. Therefore, participants will be able to explore how the toolkit support to physical/digital interaction gives people with low, when no, technical skills the possibility to rapidly prototype interactions among heterogeneous devices, thus blurring the boundaries between the physical and the digital world.

Touchless interaction techniques do not require physical contact while interacting with a system so to allow natural interaction with digital information, made tangible in the physical world through pervasive screen displays. In this project we explore the use of Nintendo Wii Remote controller as a touchless interface for interacting with map based applications in large displays environments. A prototype (Don't Touch Me) was developed that allows users to collaborative place multimodal annotations on a map: pictorials, auditives and haptics.

In this work we present a system to encode location based information extracted from a media collection (the Flickr tagging system) into a single 2D physical label. This information is clustered by using locations metadata (geotags) and key-words (tags) associated to pictures. Our system helps two types of users: the user authoring the physical label and the final user who retrieves up-to-date information scanning the label with his/her camera phone. Preliminary results for a given seed word (the tag Napoli) on 3000 photographs are presented, together with some ad-hoc weighting factors that help in finding significant pictures (representing places) that can be associated to a specific area.