The rapid evolution of human–robot interaction, particularly within human–robot collaboration, presents a transformative opportunity through mixed reality (MR) technologies to redefine industrial automation and safety. This article addresses the increasing demand for intuitive human–robot interfaces in emerging paradigms like Industry 5.0 and the Industrial Metaverse. Our motivation is to bridge the gap in understanding how users naturally interact with collaborative robots when immersed in MR environments. We present a novel elicitation study utilizing a Microsoft Hololens 2 head-mounted display (HMD), where users perceived their gestures directly controlling a cobot through real-time visual feedback within the MR space. This methodology allowed us to derive a set of natural, intuitive gesture-based control mechanisms tailored for MR-enhanced industrial robotics. The novelty lies in providing empirically grounded insights into user-defined gestural language under MR constraints for cobot navigation tasks and exploring the influence of user characteristics on these gestures. Our findings demonstrate MR’s potential to foster a more integrated, productive, and safe workspace by enhancing operational efficiency, reducing operator learning curves, and improving safety protocols in high-risk settings. We also identify key differences in gesture selection based on gender (in the gesture’s “Nature”) and professional background (in the gesture’s “Locale”), providing design implications for user-adaptive interfaces. These findings advance the applicability of MR technology in complex industrial environments, proposing new paradigms for human–robot interaction.

Mental health and wellbeing have become one of the significant challenges in global society, for which emotional regulation strategies hold the potential to offer a transversal approach to addressing them. However, the persistently declining adherence of patients to therapeutic interventions, coupled with the limited applicability of current technological interventions across diverse individuals and diagnoses, underscores the need for innovative solutions. We present ARCADIA, a Mixed-Reality platform strategically co-designed with therapists to enhance emotional regulation and self-compassion. ARCADIA comprises several gamified therapeutic activities, with a strong emphasis on fostering patient motivation. Through a dual study involving therapists and mental health patients, we validate the fully functional prototype of ARCADIA. Encouraging results are observed in terms of system usability, user engagement, and therapeutic potential. These findings lead us to believe that the combination of Mixed Reality and gamified therapeutic activities could be a significant tool in the future of mental health.

Deictic expressions – such as uttering ”this tool” and pointing at a hammer – are important and frequent elements of everyday communication. They are used, for example, when conveying location and orientation information, or when identifying objects. Pointing gestures exist among all known cultures, languages and ethnicities, but they depend on parties to be collocated. When communicating across distances, deictic expressions are usually lost. In this paper, we introduce an approach for communicating deictic pointing across distances by simulating the sender hand posture in the receiver’s hand using electrical muscle stimulation (EMS). We describe our prototypical implementation of this approach and report on a lab-based user study evaluating it. Our results indicate that it is technically feasible to use EMS for communicating deictic pointing gestures across distances. Participants in our study were successful in resolving deictic expressions consisting of verbal and gestural components. Furthermore, our results provide initial insights into user behavior, user satisfaction and specific challenges in this context. Our contributions can inform the design of future interfaces for naturally transmitting pointing gestures across distances.

Mobile systems provide many means to relay information to a distant partner, but remote communication is still limited compared to face-to-face interaction. Deictic communication and pointing, in particular, are challenging when two parties communicate across distances. In this paper, we investigate how people envision remote pointing would work when using mobile devices. We report on an elicitation study where we asked participants to perform a series of remote pointing tasks. Our results provide initial insights into user behaviors and specific issues in this context. We discovered that most people follow one of two basic patterns, that their individual pointing behavior is very consistent and that the shape and location of the target object have little influence on the pointing gesture used. From our results, we derived a set of design guidelines for future user interfaces for remote pointing. Our contributions can benefit designers and researchers of such interfaces.