Photorealistic self-avatars with facial tracking bring VR communication closer to face-to-face interaction, but also expose a fundamental limitation: people often lack accurate awareness and control of their own facial expressions. As a result, directly mirroring facial movements may not reliably convey users’ intended expressions in social VR. We propose modulating rendered expressions on avatars to improve social interaction in VR (e.g., exaggerating positive ones). To design effective modulation strategies and understand how modulation impacts user behavior and perception, we invited 18 participants to perform emotional expressions under varying modulation levels. We collected their self-reported ratings on accuracy and social appropriateness, as well as naturalness ratings and emotion recognition results from 18 additional observers who viewed the expressions. Results show that suppressing rendered expressions amplified participants’ actual facial movements, with effects differing by expression type. Based on our findings, we calculated the modulation ranges for different expressions and developed a real-time modulation system that exaggerates users’ facial expressions with a mild amplitude. We evaluated the system through a VR speech task where 12 participants delivered speeches with and without modulation. Results showed that the applied modulation improved emotional expressiveness and performance. Finally, we developed three application prototypes to illustrate the broader practical implications of our findings.

Virtual Reality (VR) enables users to engage with capabilities beyond human limitations, but it is not always obvious how to trigger these capabilities. Taking the lens of Affordance [35], we believe avatar design is the key to solving this issue, which ideally should communicate its capabilities and how to activate them. To understand the current practice, we selected eight capabilities across four categories and invited twelve professional designers to design avatars that communicate the capabilities and their corresponding interactions. From the resulting designs, we formed 16 guidelines to provide general and category-specific recommendations. Then, we validated these guidelines by letting two groups of twelve participants design avatars with and without guidelines. Participants rated the guidelines’ clarity and usefulness highly. External judges confirmed that avatars designed with the guidelines were more intuitive in conveying the capabilities and interaction methods. Finally, we demonstrated the applicability of the guidelines in avatar design for four VR applications.

Smart home products (SHPs) significantly enhance the well-being of elderly people, who are eager to use them but often hindered by cognitive limitations, deepening the digital divide. This research, grounded in social transformation and affordance actualisation theories, explores how to improve SHP utilisation for elderly people. It examines industry impacts and identifies specific challenges and affordances related to elderly people’ use of SHPs. Key findings reveal that functional, social, and emotional values are crucial in driving SHP adoption. Challenges faced by elderly people include inertia, low internet efficacy, effort redundancy, perceived privacy risks, and unreasonable information formats. Identified affordances to overcome these challenges include system reliability, timely system feedback, enhanced human–computer interaction, and anthropomorphism. This paper highlights the need for targeted strategies to enhance SHPs accessibility and usability for elderly people, addressing both individual and product-related obstacles.

Recent advancements in Intelligent Connected Vehicle (ICV) systems highlight the critical importance of cybersecurity within these complex networks, yet they still face challenges such as difficulties in precise modeling and poor adaptability to dynamic environments. This paper introduces an innovative control approach by integrating an event-triggered Intermittent Control (IC) strategy within a Zero-Trust Framework (ZTF). This methodology selectively triggers events for vehicle identities and data that meet a predefined trust threshold during each control interval, significantly enhancing the dynamic response capability of the platoon control system. By optimizing resource allocation, this strategy ensures secure and reliable signal transmission and effectively safeguards the platoon against potential malicious node attacks. Consequently, this research offers a novel solution for achieving both security and efficiency in ICV platoon control.

CHI ’25, Yokohama, Japan

We introduce VR-Doh, an open-source, hands-on 3D modeling system that enables intuitive creation and manipulation of elastoplastic objects in Virtual Reality (VR). By customizing the Material Point Method (MPM) for real-time simulation of hand-induced large deformations and enhancing 3D Gaussian Splatting for seamless rendering, VR-Doh provides an interactive and immersive 3D modeling experience. Users can naturally sculpt, deform, and edit objects through both contact- and gesture-based hand-object interactions. To achieve real-time performance, our system incorporates localized simulation techniques, particle-level collision handling, and the decoupling of physical and appearance representations, ensuring smooth and responsive interactions. VR-Doh supports both object creation and editing, enabling diverse modeling tasks such as designing food items, characters, and interlocking structures, all resulting in simulation-ready assets. User studies with both novice and experienced participants highlight the system's intuitive design, immersive feedback, and creative potential. Compared to existing geometric modeling tools, VR-Doh offers enhanced accessibility and natural interaction, making it a powerful tool for creative exploration in VR.

Style is prone to experience but hard to formulate, even for design professionals. The current style classification (SC) methods can be categorized into mono-tasking (style) and multi-tasking (style, artists, genre, and other additional clues). However, the style strength spread-out phenomenon challenges them by the uncertain noises’ distribution and unstable distinguishable feature representation. The multiple sub-styles make the principal style recognition hard for current SC approaches with lower accuracy. This article proposes the community transferrable representation learning (CTRL) framework inspired by community detection and style transfer studies. The community feature is the transferrable feature embeddings in latent space through all samples within the same style concept. Therefore, instead of learning the unique style features, we introduce the learnable transferrable embeddings, whose distance will be smaller for the intraclass and larger for the interclass, to represent the principal style concept. There are two generative processes, p-AE and q-AE, as the cooperative operations to learn the community styles by the proposed diamond cells (D-cells) in a stacked way. The proposed community loss includes two terms: the invariance term is used to make the principal style embedding consistent, and the redundancy reduction term can decorate the different vector embeddings of sub-styles. The style classification and style feature learning model are optimized simultaneously in a semi-supervised way to learn the class-level style representation. We conduct experiments on six style datasets (three oil paintings, one architecture, one fashion, and one general image). Results show that the proposed framework brings a performance gain of 2%–7% in terms of accuracy compared with the SOTA approaches.

Biomimicry, a methodology adapted from nature, always inspires optimum solutions and innovative technologies in human history. To get children interested in, excited about, and inspired by biomimicry, we introduce KiPneu, a robotic platform that facilitates biomimicry education through hands-on, solution-oriented learning and a digital learning environment. KiPneu allows children to mimic flexible animal locomotion, like fish swimming or worm squirming, using low-cost building blocks and non-electrical pneumatic actuators. We provide five types of non-electrical tangible valves to adjust robot motion characteristics, such as direction and speed, through engaging tangible programming. Additionally, to facilitate the whole learning process, KiPneu comes with interactive instructional interface that visualize and simulate the pneumatic system. To validate KiPneu’s educational efficacy, we conducted a three-day workshop with 21 children aged 5-12. Pre-and-post surveys revealed KiPneu not only enhanced their understanding of animal locomotion mechanisms but also spurred interest in creative construction using acquired knowledge.

Virtual reality (VR) is a revolutionary method of presenting data visualizations, which brings potential possibilities for enhancing analytical activities. However, applying this method to visualize complex data flows remains largely underexplored, especially the Sankey diagrams, which have an advantageous capacity to represent trends in data flows. In this work, we explored a novel design for the immersive Sankey diagram system within VR environments, utilizing a three-dimensional visual design and several interaction techniques that leveraged VR's spatial and immersive capabilities. Through two comparative user studies, we found the effectiveness of the VR Sankey diagram system in improving task performance and engagement and reducing cognitive workload in complex data analysis. We contribute an interactive, immersive Sankey diagram system in VR environments, empirical evidence of its advantages, and design lessons for future immersive visualization tools.

Building shape-changing, robotic or deployable interfaces is notoriously difficult, often requiring fabrication skills or specialized hardware. We present a construction kit for novice users to enable immediate hands-on exploration of custom shape-changing or robotic structures through pneumatically actuated origami tubes. Our construction kit consists of generic origami actuators that can be combined with our connectors to result in a variety of shapes and motions. Our novel connectors support simple mechanical connections through snap fits and pneumatic configurations through plugs. To assist users in designing and previewing complex deformations, we provide a design tool that generates control code for user-defined designs. We envision that our construction kit will facilitate creativity support tasks (e.g. product design) or education. We demonstrate the capabilities of our construction kit with three application examples and a series of objects created during our co-creation study with novice users.

Creating personalized 3D printing objects has become increasingly popular with the advance in end-user modeling tools and fabrication techniques. However, it remains challenging for novice makers to design and fabricate functional objects with mechanical motion such as linear or rotational. To empower users to add mechanical movements to their models for particular needs, we first investigate the commonly used 3D printable mechanisms and parameterize four mechanical primitives. We then provide a computational approach to reconfigure the mechanical primitives to user-provided 3D models, with an underlying structural optimization procedure according to a specified bending force. We further showcase a set of design examples and conduct a user study to demonstrate the potential of our approach in creating personalized functional artifacts.

Voice user interfaces (VUI) are becoming indispensable in car for offering drivers the opportunity to make distraction-free inputs and conduct complex tasks. However, the usability and control efficiency of today’s VUI remain to be enhanced due to its sequential nature. In this work, we explored gestural input on the steering wheel to improve the interaction efficiency of VUI. Based on limitations in VUI, we designed novel gestural commands on the steering wheel to augment them. We also elicited corresponding user-defined gestures by exploring drivers’ touch behavior. Then, we implemented a prototype attached to the steering wheel for recognizing gestures. Finally, we evaluated our system’s usability regarding driving performance, interaction efficiency, cognitive workload and user feedback. Results revealed that our system improved the control efficiency of VUI and reduced workload without a significant reduction in driving distraction than just using VUI.

Abstract Entering text with a general five-key TV remote is a laborious task. A strategy for entering text with two interconnected cursors is proposed, whereby a secondary cursor is employed to maneuver the main cursor through fast-tracks. The main cursor is maneuvered in a 2D full-size onscreen keyboard space, whereas the sub-cursor moves among all predictive candidates in a 1D subspace. Each cursor is operated by a specific interaction method, and the movement of either must be mapped from one to the other. Compared to single-cursor methods, the combination of the main cursor and the sub-cursor operations usually results in fewer manual loadings, even when the target character is out of the prediction list range. A computer simulation based on a corpus of 57 258 multimedia titles (in Chinese) demonstrated that the keystrokes per character, powered by a dual-cursor technique, could be predicted to be reduced by 38.6–69.9% with very few predictive candidates for various keyboard layouts (compared with those of conventional non-predictive method). The keyboard layout and the number of candidates were further investigated by means of a usability test. The results revealed that with only 10 min of practice, novice users could achieve a mean text entry speed of 33.3, 29.5 and 22.8 characters per minute for QWERTY, alphabetic square, and alphabetic two-row layouts, respectively, which is 31.6%, 14.3% and 67.6% faster than the corresponding conventional input method, and is 12.7%, 6.9% and 25.0% faster than the current version of popup dialog method. The dual-cursor can significantly improve perceived usability and offers the potential to be applied to numerous other cursor-based text entry contexts. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS A new interaction strategy for TV input with two interconnected cursors. This strategy employs long-pressing for jumping around predicted candidates and short-pressing for navigating through keyboard keys. The number of keystrokes could be predicted to be reduced by 38.6–69.9% when compared with that of the conventional non-predictive input method for various keyboard layouts. Few predicted candidates were required to achieve a substantial decrement of keystrokes. The user experiment showed that novice users’ TV input speed could be substantially increased with dual-cursor.

Human epidermis, as the largest organ on body, has become a new design platform for wearable computing. The availability of miniature electronics makes more possibilities for on-skin designs. In this paper, we present AnimSkin, a thin-film interface, which will emit dynamic color animations directly on skin. This is done by using thermochromic material embedded with transparent electrode acting as a capacitive sensor. Moreover, an accessible and low-cost fabrication method is introduced. Individuals could also customize aesthetic graphic designs by following the detailed fabrication process to achieve personalized patterns. We propose four different dynamic types of color animation by applying certain voltage to the heating circuitry. With two examples, Email Reminder and Light Control System, we demonstrate how AnimSkin can be integrated into everyday life, and specifically, we show how AnimSkin can benefit areas such as on-skin design, thin-film interface and beauty technology.

From industrial design, the concepts of product family and product family DNA were introduced, and the relationship between industrial design and engineering design of product family was analyzed. The framework and representation structure of product family DNA design were proposed, and the research methods and key technologies were reviewed. The applications of product family DNA design in academia and industries were formulated, and the deficiencies were discussed. Taken the telephone form design as an example, a prototype product family DNA conceptual design system is implemented, which consists essentially of the knowledge agents. With this system, product designer can direct new products in the same family.

One of the problems in building collaborative and intelligent design systems is the difficulty in integrating computer supported collaborative work (CSCW) with knowledge to generate results to the satisfaction of designers who often have high demands on aesthetics. In order to assist designers in the early stages of a product development this paper develops an intelligent methodology for integrating user knowledge and design knowledge. Taken the mobile phone form design as an example, a prototype intelligent conceptual design system is implemented, which consists essentially of the knowledge agents, each of which is a knowledge system with the capabilities of problem reasoning and learning. With this system, product designer and user can carry out simultaneously and intelligently in an Internet-based computer-aided product concurrent design system.