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.

Interpersonal touch is critical for social-emotional development and presents a powerful modality for communicating emotions. Virtual agents of the future could capitalize on touch to establish social bonds with humans and facilitate cooperation in virtual reality (VR). We studied whether the emotional expression of a virtual agent would affect the way humans touch the agent. Participants were asked to hold a pressure-sensing tube presented as the agent’s arm in VR. Upon seeing the agent’s emotional expression change, participants briefly squeezed the arm. The effect of emotional expressions on affective state was measured using self-reported valence and arousal as well as physiology-based indices. Onset, duration, and intensity of the squeeze were recorded to examine the haptic responses. Emotional expression of agents affected squeeze intensity and duration through changes in emotional perception and experience. Haptic responses may thus provide an implicit measure of persons’ experience towards their virtual companion.

Technological support for augmenting the relationship that people establish with remote places has been studied fairly little as the primary focus in telepresence studies is the connection between people. This paper addresses the design challenge for supporting "active place presence" at home. A prototype, Hole in Space, was created to explore the design challenge. A longitudinal study of how an urban couple appropriated the prototype was conducted over the duration of seven months. The paper elaborates on how the Web-mediated design influenced place presence and outlines several aspects that need to be considered when designing for active place presence at home.

Virtual reality presents an extraordinary platform for multimodal communication. Haptic technologies have been shown to provide an important contribution to this by facilitating co-presence and allowing affective communication. However, the findings of the affective influences rely on studies that have used myriad different types of haptic technology, making it likely that some forms of tactile feedback are more efficient in communicating emotions than others. To find out whether this is true and which haptic technologies are most effective, we measured user experience during a communication scenario featuring an affective agent and interpersonal touch in virtual reality. Interpersonal touch was simulated using two types of vibrotactile actuators and two types of force feedback mechanisms. Self-reports of subjective experience of the agent’s touch and emotions were obtained. The results revealed that, regardless of the agent’s expression, force feedback actuators were rated as more natural and resulted in greater emotional interdependence and a stronger sense of co-presence than vibrotactile touch.

We propose the use of a single continuous gesture as a novel, intuitive, and efficient mechanism to authenticate a secure communication channel. Our approach builds on a novel algorithm for encoding (at least 20-bits) authentication information as a single continuous gesture, referred to as a checksum gesture. By asking the user to perform the generated gesture, a secure channel can be authenticated. Results from a controlled user experiment (N = 13 participants, 1022 trials) demonstrate the feasibility of our technique, showing over 90% success rate in establishing a secure communication channel despite relying on complex gesture patterns. The authentication times of our method are over three-folds faster than with previous gesture-based solutions. The average execution time of a gesture is 5:7 seconds in our study, which is comparable to the input time of conventional text input based PIN authentication. Our approach is particularly well-suited for scenarios involving wearable devices that lack conventional input capabilities, e.g., pairing a smartwatch with an interactive display.

Advanced interactive visualization such as in virtual environments and ubiquitous interaction paradigms pose new challenges and opportunities in considering real-time responses to subliminal cues. In this paper, we propose a synthetic reality platform that, combined with psychophysiological recordings, enables us to study in realtime the effects of various subliminal cues. We endeavor to integrate various aspects known to be relevant to implicit perception. The context is of consumer experience and choice of an artifact where the generation of subliminal perception through an intelligent 3D interface controls the spatio-temporal aspects of the information displayed and of the emergent narrative. One novel contribution of this work is the programmable nature of the interface that exploits known perceptive phenomena (e.g. masking, crowding and change blindness) to generate subliminal perception.