Augmented Reality (AR) can enhance accessibility by anchoring virtual windows to the user's body. Among common approaches, head-following windows help maintain floating virtual windows within the user's field of view. Previous studies have actively explored this new design space to improve user experience and efficiency. In contrast, this study focuses on the perceived resistance of head-following windows in AR, despite their lack of physical mass. We conducted a within-subject experiment with 24 participants, manipulating Follow-Up Delay, Window Size, and UI Type. We measured subjective resistance ratings, NASA-TLX (Raw TLX Scores), and the gaze-head angular offset. The results showed that both a certain level of Follow-Up Delay and the Tag-Along elicited significantly stronger perceived resistance as well as task load. Although Window Size alone did not show a significant effect on resistance ratings, we observed an interaction between the size and UI Type. These findings extend existing pseudo-haptics research by revealing the previously unexplored domain of resistance in head-based interactions with head-following virtual windows. We further provide design implications for head-following windows in AR.

Gesture-based locomotion enhances immersion in virtual reality (VR), with seated motion being crucial for accessibility and prolonged use. However, existing techniques often apply uniform gesture-to-walking speed mappings, ignoring the fact that different gestures involve varying levels of physical effort and subjective impressions. This mismatch can degrade the user experience. This study investigates how three seated gestures with different physical loads—Tap-in-Place (TIP), Swing-in-Place (SIP), and Grip-in-Place (GIP)—influence users’ expected walking speed. While the evaluations revealed unique experiential trade-offs for each gesture, our primary finding is a consistent perceptual pattern in the expectation of walking speed: Users expected to walk fastest with SIP, followed by GIP, then TIP (SIP > GIP > TIP). These results demonstrate that a one-size-fits-all approach is insufficient and provide empirical recommendations for designing more intuitive seated VR locomotion systems that align walking speed with user perception.

Mediated reality, where augmented reality (AR) and diminished reality (DR) meet, enables visual modifications to real-world objects. A physical object with a mediated reality visual change retains its original physical properties. However, it is perceived differently from the original when interacted with. We present such a mediated reality object, a stick with different lengths or a stick with a missing portion in the middle, to investigate how users perceive its weight and center of gravity. We conducted two user studies ($N=10$N=10), each of which consisted of two substudies. We found that the length of mediated reality sticks influences the perceived weight. A longer stick is perceived as lighter, and vice versa. The stick with a missing portion tends to be recognized as one continuous stick. Thus, its weight and center of gravity (COG) remain the same. We formulated the relationship between inertia based on the reported COG and perceived weight in the context of dynamic touch.

Users in a prolonged experience of virtual reality adopt a sitting position according to their task, as they do in the real world. However, inconsistencies in the haptic feedback from a chair they sit on in the real world and that which is expected in the virtual world decrease the feeling of presence. We aimed to change the perceived haptic features of a chair by shifting the position and angle of the users' viewpoints in the virtual reality environment. The targeted features in this study were seat softness and backrest flexibility. To enhance the seat softness, we shifted the virtual viewpoint using an exponential formula soon after a user's bottom contacted the seat surface. The flexibility of the backrest was manipulated by moving the viewpoint, which followed the tilt of the virtual backrest. These shifts make users feel as if their body moves along with the viewpoint; as a result, they would perceive pseudo-softness or flexibility consistently with the body movement. Based on subjective evaluations, we confirmed that the participants perceived the seat as being softer and the backrest as being more flexible than the actual ones. These results demonstrated that only shifting the viewpoint could change the participants' perceptions of the haptic features of their seats, although significant changes created strong discomfort.

Augmented reality (AR) allows us to wear virtual displays that are registered to our bodies and devices. Such virtually extendable displays, or AR extended displays (AREDs), provide personal display space and are free from physical restrictions. Existing work has explored the new design space to improve user experience and efficiency. Contrary to this direction, we focus on the weight that the user perceives from AREDs, even though they are virtual and have no physical weight. Our user study results show evidence that AREDs can be a source of pseudo-weight, in addition to that of a handheld physical display device. We also systematically evaluate the perceived weight changes depending on the layout and delay in the visualization system. These findings are similar to those in existing pseudo-haptics research. However, we found such behavior in pseudo-weight for a real device and virtual visual stimuli in the air, which differentiates our research from previous work.