We contribute an analysis of the prevalence and relative performance of archetypal VR menu techniques. An initial survey of 108 menu interfaces in 84 popular commercial VR applications establishes common design characteristics. These characteristics motivate the design of raycast, direct, and marking menu archetypes, and a two-experiment comparison of their relative performance with one and two levels of hierarchy using 8 or 24 items. With a single-level menu, direct input is the fastest interaction technique in general, and is unaffected by number of items. With a two-level hierarchical menu, marking is fastest regardless of item number. Menus using raycasting, the most common menu interaction technique, were among the slowest of the tested menus but were rated most consistently usable. Using the combined results, we provide design and implementation recommendations with applications to general VR menu design.

Inspired by physical possessions displayed in the home, we define “digital knick-knacks” as standalone audiovisual digital possessions or embellishments contained within non-game digital environments. “Neko”, a cat that chases the cursor, is a historical example. We propose a taxonomy to define and generate digital knick-knacks based on key publications on consumer behaviour and personal possessions, augmented by results of a brainstorming session with 9 HCI researchers. Using the taxonomy, we prototype three classes of digital knick-knack exemplars: an ambient noise machine, a virtual pet, and a virtual picture frame. In a 10-day diary study, 10 participants design their own variants of the prototypes, and report on their experience using them on a personal device. Our analysis shows how digital knick-knacks can bring value to users, and we suggest implications for designing playful digital embellishments.

Due to the Proteus effect, in which people modify their behaviour based on their avatar, participant avatar representation is an important factor in virtual reality (VR) studies. We develop an open source prototype avatar customization system that enables quick customization of semi-realistic, ethnically-diverse avatars. The prototype provides options for customizing body and face shape, hairstyle, glasses, religious clothing, and skin, eye, and hair colour. The prototype generates avatar assets that are fully rigged and textured for incorporation into VR study code, and it serves as a step towards designing more inclusive VR research studies.

"Easter eggs" are features hidden inside software, and the practice of developers including them is a long-standing global phenomenon. They have seen some investigation in the context of games, but despite their prevalence in non-game software applications, their nature within this context is less clear. We perform a qualitative, investigative analysis of Easter eggs in non-game software application contexts, using primarily archival research including discussion forums, social media posts, and user-created online databases, along with select developer interviews. Our work uncovers the stories behind, motivations for creating, and intended perceptions of Easter eggs, which we present as categories of purposes with illustrative examples. This analysis also informs a categorization and discussion of processes that Easter eggs undergo concerning the social and emotional circumstances of their developers and users. Finally, we use our results to motivate future directions for applying Easter eggs in user interfaces.

We examine a vocabulary of affective language, borrowed from Roland Barthes’ “A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments,” and its applicability to discourse describing smartphone attachment. This vocabulary, adopted from four of Barthes’ terms, waiting, dependency, anxiety, and absence, is used as a discursive lens to illustrate some of the many ways people understand and engage with their relationships to their smartphones. Based on this, a survey is conducted, and a speculative technology probe is created in the form of an instrumented pillow for people to lock away their smartphones during the night. The pillow is deployed in a diary study in which five people sleep with their phone locked away for multiple nights. The self-reported and observed behaviours are presented in a selection of vignettes. The results support the proposed discursive lens and suggest future interdisciplinary strategies to investigate how people relate to interactive technology, using a combined approach of literary theory and a technology probe supported by survey and study data.

Many file-system applications such as defragmentation tools, file-system checkers, or data recovery tools, operate at the storage layer. Today, developers of these file-system aware storage applications require detailed knowledge of the file-system format, which requires significant time to learn, often by trial and error, due to insufficient documentation or specification of the format. Furthermore, these applications perform ad-hoc processing of the file-system metadata, leading to bugs and vulnerabilities. We propose Spiffy, an annotation language for specifying the on-disk format of a file system. File-system developers annotate the data structures of a file system, and we use these annotations to generate a library that allows identifying, parsing, and traversing file-system metadata, providing support for both offline and online storage applications. This approach simplifies the development of storage applications that work across different file systems because it reduces the amount of file-system--specific code that needs to be written. We have written annotations for the Linux Ext4, Btrfs, and F2FS file systems, and developed several applications for these file systems, including a type-specific metadata corruptor, a file-system converter, an online storage layer cache that preferentially caches files for certain users, and a runtime file-system checker. Our experiments show that applications built with the Spiffy library for accessing file-system metadata can achieve good performance and are robust against file-system corruption errors.

When fabricating, it is common to follow a prescribed set of steps in a tutorial or how-to. While popular, such explicit knowledge resources have many inconsistencies and omissions, use static illustrations, and cannot adapt to drop-in makers or a maker's mistakes. To overcome many of these issues, this work presents Automatics, a novel explicit knowledge resource system that dynamically generates fabrication activities for one or more makers based on their current environmental and fabrication context. Automatics assigns tasks to makers based on the past tools and components the maker was working with, enables makers to recover from mistakes through model regeneration, suggests alternative tools if a needed tool is unavailable or in use, and allows multiple makers to drop-in throughout a fabrication activity. Initial usage and feedback from novice makers showed that Automatics increases the number of tasks that can be completed compared to paper instructions, decreases frustration, and improves one's understanding of the global context of assigned tasks during fabrication activities.

Within this work, a novel metaphor, haunted design, is explored to challenge the definitions of "display" used today. Haunted design draws inspiration and vision from some of the most multi-modal and sensory diverse experiences that have been reported, the paranormal and hauntings. By synthesizing and deconstructing such phenomena, four novel opportunities to direct display design were uncovered, e.g., intensity, familiarly, tangibility, and shareability. A large-scale design probe, The Living Room, guided the ideation and prototyping of design concepts that exemplify facets of haunted design. By combining the opportunities, design concepts, and survey responses, a framework highlighting the importance of objects, their behavior, and the resulting phenomena to haunted design was developed. Given its emphasis on the odd and unusual, the haunted design metaphor should great spur conversation and alternative directions for future display-based user experiences.