Related papers: Rethinking Immersive Virtual Reality and Empathy
People with visual impairments perceive their environment non-visually and often use AI-powered assistive tools to obtain textual descriptions of visual information. Recent large vision-language model-based AI-powered tools like Be My AI…
We can create Virtual Reality (VR) interactions that have no equivalent in the real world by remapping spacetime or altering users' body representation, such as stretching the user's virtual arm for manipulation of distant objects or…
This paper explores the economics of Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) technologies within decision-making contexts. Two metrics are proposed: Context Entropy, the informational complexity of an environment, and Context…
While assistive robots have much potential to help older people with frailty-related needs, there are few in use. There is a gap between what is developed in laboratories and what would be viable in real-world contexts. Through a series of…
Zoomorphic robots have the potential to offer companionship and well-being as accessible, low-maintenance alternatives to pet ownership. Many such robots, however, feature limited emotional expression, restricting their potential for rich…
As virtual reality (VR) emerges as a mainstream platform, designers have started to experiment new interaction techniques to enhance the user experience. This is a challenging task because designers not only strive to provide designs with…
As more people meet, interact, and socialize online, Social Virtual Reality (VR) emerges as a technology that bridges the gap between traditional face-to-face and online communication. Unlike traditional screen-based applications, Social VR…
Understanding citizens' values in participatory systems is crucial for citizen-centric policy-making. We envision a hybrid participatory system where participants make choices and provide motivations for those choices, and AI agents…
Machine learning practitioners are often ambivalent about the ethical aspects of their products. We believe anything that gets us from that current state to one in which our systems are achieving some degree of fairness is an improvement…
Empathetic Conversational Systems (ECS) are built to respond empathetically to the user's emotions and sentiments, regardless of the application domain. Current ECS studies evaluation approaches are restricted to offline evaluation…
In most VR experiences, the visual sense dominates other modes of sensory input, encouraging non-visual senses to respond as if the visual were real. The simulated visual world thus becomes a sort of felt actuality, where the 'actual'…
Empathy is a cognitive and emotional reaction to an observed situation of others. Empathy has recently attracted interest because it has numerous applications in psychology and AI, but it is unclear how different forms of empathy (e.g.,…
AI is increasingly used to scale collective decision-making, but far less attention has been paid to how such systems can support procedural legitimacy, particularly the conditions shaping losers' consent: whether participants who do not…
Commercial Virtual Reality (VR) transforms people's virtual experiences but introduces deceptive design opportunities that threaten user privacy. Although privacy deceptive patterns on 2D platforms are well-documented, their impacts in VR…
As technologies become more and more pervasive, there is a need for considering the affective dimension of interaction with computer systems to make them more human-like. Current demands for this matter include accurate emotion recognition,…
Disabled people experience many barriers in daily life, but non-disabled people rarely pause to reflect and engage in joint action to advocate for access. In this demo, we explore the potential of Virtual Reality (VR) to sensitize…
Virtual Reality has become a significant element of education throughout the years. To understand the quality and advantages of these techniques, it is important to understand how they were developed and evaluated. Since COVID-19, the…
Virtual reality (VR) is not a new technology but has been in development for decades, driven by advances in computer technology. Currently, VR technology is increasingly being used in applications to enable immersive, yet controlled…
When collaborating face-to-face, people commonly use the surfaces and spaces around them to perform sensemaking tasks, such as spatially organising documents, notes or images. However, when people collaborate remotely using desktop…
This paper addresses the concept of materiality in virtual environments, which we define as being composed of objects that can influence user experience actively. Such virtual materiality is closely related to its physical counterpart,…