As winter sports continue to grow in popularity, the need for effective avalanche rescue training becomes increasingly critical. While effective, traditional training methods face challenges such as logistical constraints and limited accessibility. This study investigates the potential of virtual reality (VR) as an alternative approach to enhance avalanche rescue training. We conducted a comparative analysis between traditional ($\mathrm{N}=21$) and VR ($\mathrm{N}=22$) training methods, focusing on participants' knowledge retention, procedural adherence, and confidence in handling real-life scenarios and equipment. Our findings indicate that VR training offers comparable learning outcomes to traditional methods, with the added benefits of increased engagement and accessibility. However, challenges in handling equipment suggest that VR should complement, rather than replace, hands-on training. This research contributes valuable insights into integrating immersive technologies in safety education and the potential for VR to improve training effectiveness in highrisk environments.

The lack of tactile feedback and occlusion from visual tracking systems hinders touch interaction in Extended Reality (XR) environments. In this work, we present a method that enables touch gesture interaction on any physical surface using smartwatch-based inertial sensing. By using accelerometer data from a smartwatch, our approach captures micro-wrist movements to detect seven distinct touch gestures with 91.67% accuracy via a Long Short-Term Memory neural network. Our approach allows users to interact with XR interfaces anchored to everyday surfaces, such as tables or walls, while benefiting from natural haptic feedback. We introduce a dataset collected from 20 participants to demonstrate the feasibility through a controlled study. Our findings show that smartwatch sensing offers a low-cost, mobile, and accurate solution for extending XR input capabilities beyond the camera’s view on physical surfaces, paving the way for more natural and privacy-preserving interaction in future XR systems.

Inspired by the concepts of diminishing reality and ad-blocking in browsers, this study investigates the perceived benefits and concerns of blocking physical, real-world content, particularly ads, through Extended Reality (XR). To understand how users perceive this concept, we first conducted a user study (N = 18) with an ad-blocking prototype to gather initial insights. The results revealed a mixed willingness to adopt XR blockers, with participants appreciating aspects such as customizability, convenience, and privacy. Expected benefits included enhanced focus and reduced stress, while concerns centered on missing important information and increased feelings of isolation. Hence, we investigated the user acceptance of different ad-blocking visualizations through a follow-up online survey (N = 120), comparing six concepts based on related work. The results indicated that the XR ad-blocker visualizations play a significant role in how and for what kinds of advertisements such a concept might be used, paving the path for future feedback-driven prototyping.

Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) technologies have gained prominence in scientific and industrial contexts over the last decade. While extensive evaluations of their potential benefits and challenges exist, public perceptions of the psychological and social issues associated with VR and AR remain less explored. This study addresses this gap by examining public attitudes toward these issues and the broader impact of such technologies through a two-part online survey (N=150). Our findings reveal that participants hold a nuanced perspective, clearly distinguishing between VR and AR, expressing optimism about potential applications yet voicing concerns regarding their effects on health, social interactions, and overreliance. This study contributes empirical evidence on public perceptions of VR and AR, offering valuable insights for developers, designers, and policymakers.

Studying shoulder surfing in natural settings presents substantial methodological challenges, including ethical considerations and preventing mutual influence between observers and those observed. This paper contributes to understanding opportunistic shoulder surfing in public environments, particularly public transportation, a vital space for diverse user groups. We first derive a research space on shoulder surfing to identify unresolved methodological issues. Then, we introduce our methodology for studying shoulder surfing in the wild using eye tracking. In our case study, participant observers wore mobile eye trackers during public transport journeys, allowing us to capture natural, often opportunistic, shoulder surfing behavior. From this, we derived valuable lessons learned and recommendations for future research. Our efforts deepen the understanding of shoulder surfing in real-world settings and pave the way for more effective mitigation strategies.

The pervasive multiverse, an interconnected web of diverse and dynamic digital landscapes, promises to redefine our understanding of computing's reach and impact. Hereby, it extends beyond the traditional boundaries of pervasive computing: digital ecosystems seamlessly intertwine with the physical, creating an immersive and interconnected experience across devices, contexts, and users.

We present the results of the first field study (N = 132) investigating users' (1) awareness of Android privacy permissions granted to installed apps and (2) control behavior over these permissions. Our research is motivated by many smartphone features and apps requiring access to personal data. While Android provides privacy permission management mechanisms to control access to this data, its usage is not yet well understood. To this end, we built and deployed an Android application on participants' smartphones, acquiring data on actual privacy permission states of installed apps, monitoring permission changes, and assessing reasons for changes using experience sampling. The results of our study show that users often conduct multiple revocations in short time frames, and revocations primarily affect rarely used apps or permissions non-essential for apps' core functionality. Our findings can inform future (proactive) privacy control mechanisms and help target opportune moments for supporting privacy control.

For individuals with Social Anxiety (SA), interacting with others can be a challenging experience, a concern that extends into the virtual world. While technology has made significant strides in creating more realistic virtual human agents (VHA), the interplay of gaze and interpersonal distance when interacting with VHAs is often neglected. This paper investigates the effect of dynamic and static Gaze animations in VHAs on interpersonal distance and their relation to SA. A Bayesian analysis shows that static centered and dynamic centering gaze led participants to stand closer to VHAs than static averted and dynamic averting gaze, respectively. In the static gaze conditions, this pattern was found to be reversed in SA: participants with higher SA kept larger distances for static-centered gaze than for averted gaze VHAs. These findings update theory, elucidate how nuanced interactions with VHAs must be designed, and offer renewed guidelines for pleasant VHA interaction design.

Emotions affect our perception, attention, and behavior. Hereby, the emotional state is greatly affected by the surrounding environment that can seamlessly be designed in Virtual Reality (VR). However, research typically does not account for the influence of the environment on participants’ emotions, even if this influence might alter acquired data. To mitigate the impact, we formulated a design space that explains how the creation of virtual environments influences emotions. Furthermore, we present EmotionEditor, a toolbox that assists researchers in rapidly developing virtual environments that influence and asses the users’ emotional state. We evaluated the capability of EmotionEditor to elicit emotions in a lab study (n=30). Based on interviews with VR experts (n=13), we investigate how they consider the effect of emotions in their research, how the EmotionEditor can prospectively support them, and analyze prevalent challenges in the design as well as development of VR user studies.

VR Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs) provide unlimited and personalized virtual workspaces and will enable working anytime and anywhere.However, if HMDs are to become ubiquitous, VR users are at risk of being observed, which can threaten their privacy.We examine six Bystander Awareness Notification Systems (BANS) to enhance VR users' bystander awareness whilst immersed in VR.In a user study (N=28), we explore how future HMDs equipped with BANS might enable users to maintain their privacy while contributing towards enjoyable and productive travels.Results indicate that BANS increase VR users' bystander awareness without affecting presence and productivity.Users prefer BANS that extract and present the most details of reality to facilitate their bystander awareness.We conclude by synthesizing four recommendations, such as providing VR users with control over BANS and considering how VR users can best transition between realities, to inform the design of privacy-preserving HMDs.

Extended Reality (XR) is a rapidly growing field offering unique immersive experiences, social networking, learning, and collaboration opportunities. The continuous advancements in XR technology and industry efforts are gradually moving this technology toward end consumers. However, a universal one-size-fits-all solution for seamless XR interaction still needs to be discovered. Currently, we face a diverse landscape of interaction modalities that depend on the environment, user preferences, task, and device capabilities. Commercially available input methods like handheld controllers, hand gestures, voice commands, and combinations of those need universal flexibility and expressiveness. Additionally, hybrid user interfaces, such as smartwatches and smartphones as ubiquitous input and output devices, expand this interaction design space. In this position paper, we discuss the idea of a universal interaction concept for XR. We present challenges and opportunities for implementing hybrid user interfaces, emphasizing Environment, Task, and User. We explore the potential to enhance user experiences, interaction capabilities, and the development of seamless and efficient XR interaction methods. We examine challenges and aim to stimulate a discussion on the design of generic, universal interfaces for XR.

Research preservation is a pillar for knowledge transfer, science reproducibility and saving time by reusing existing resources. However, human compliance with efficient capturing strategies is a key barrier to creating complete scientific repositories. To circumvent this issue, we introduce the term: Ubiquitous Research Preservation (URP), describing automated knowledge capturing and retrieval in computational science. We also propose a framework composed of three models for designing URP systems (URPS) to 1) understand users' interaction and data governance, 2) propose technical pipelines for data management, and 3) understand users' sharing practices. Our work is a theoretical reflection on our past experiences in designing URPS. We plan future evaluation by using the framework to analyze existing URPS. We expect a positive impact from using URPS on researchers' sense-making and ability to share findings and resources. Our framework is a checklist for design decisions needed to build successful URPS.

We propose a novel method for seamlessly identifying users by combining thermal and visible feet features. While it is known that users' feet have unique characteristics, these have so far been underutilized for biometric identification, as observing those features often requires the removal of shoes and socks. As thermal cameras are becoming ubiquitous, we foresee a new form of identification, using feet features and heat traces to reconstruct the footprint even while wearing shoes or socks. We collected a dataset of users' feet (N = 21), wearing three types of footwear (personal shoes, standard shoes, and socks) on three floor types (carpet, laminate, and linoleum). By combining visual and thermal features, an AUC between 91.1% and 98.9%, depending on floor type and shoe type can be achieved, with personal shoes on linoleum floor performing best. Our findings demonstrate the potential of thermal imaging for continuous and unobtrusive user identification.

Research on Extended Reality (XR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is booming, which has led to an emerging body of literature in their intersection. However, the main topics in this intersection are unclear, as are the benefits of combining XR and AI. This paper presents a scoping review that highlights how XR is applied in AI research and vice versa. We screened 2619 publications from 203 international venues published between 2017 and 2021, followed by an in-depth review of 311 papers. Based on our review, we identify five main topics at the intersection of XR and AI, showing how research at the intersection can benefit each other. Furthermore, we present a list of commonly used datasets, software, libraries, and models to help researchers interested in this intersection. Finally, we present 13 research opportunities and recommendations for future work in XR and AI research.

Users are the last line of defense as phishing emails pass filter mechanisms. At the same time, phishing emails are designed so that they are challenging to identify by users. To this end, attackers employ techniques, such as eliciting stress, targeting helpfulness, or exercising authority, due to which users often miss being manipulated out of malicious intent. This work builds on the assumption that manipulation techniques, even if going unnoticed by users, still lead to changes in their behavior. In this work, we present the outcomes of an online study in which we collected gaze and mouse movement data during an email sorting task. Our findings show that phishing emails lead to significant differences across behavioral features but depend on the nature of the email. We discuss how our findings can be leveraged to build security mechanisms protecting users and companies from phishing.

Existing virtual reality (VR) authentication schemes are either slow or prone to observation attacks. We propose CueVR, a cue-based authentication scheme that is resilient against observation attacks by design since vital cues are randomly generated and only visible to the user experiencing the VR environment. We investigate three different input modalities through an in-depth usability study (N=20) and show that while authentication using CueVR is slower than the less secure baseline, it is faster than existing observation resilient cue-based schemes and VR schemes (4.151 s – 7.025 s to enter a 4-digit PIN). Our results also indicate that using the controllers’ trackpad significantly outperforms input using mid-air gestures. We conclude by discussing how visual cues can enhance the security of VR authentication while maintaining high usability. Furthermore, we show how existing real-world authentication schemes combined with VR’s unique characteristics can advance future VR authentication procedures.

In this work, we explore attacker behavior during shoulder surfing. As such behavior is often opportunistic and difficult to observe in real world settings, we leverage the capabilities of virtual reality (VR). We recruited 24 participants and observed their behavior in two virtual waiting scenarios: at a bus stop and in an open office space. In both scenarios, participants shoulder surfed private screens displaying different types of content. From the results we derive an understanding of factors influencing shoulder surfing behavior, reveal common attack patterns, and sketch a behavioral shoulder surfing model. Our work suggests directions for future research on shoulder surfing and can serve as a basis for creating novel approaches to mitigate shoulder surfing.

Existing software-based smart home privacy mechanisms are frequently indirect and cumbersome to use. We developed PriKey, a tangible privacy mechanism for smart homes that offers intuitive, device-independent, sensor-based, and user-centric privacy control. To render our concept comprehensible, we implemented a demonstration consisting of Wizard-of-Oz prototypes that show the envisioned form factor, size, and portability of our system, as well as a larger functional prototype of PriKey, which enables control of privacy-invasive sensors integrated into two exemplary smart devices, i.e., a smart speaker and a tablet.

We explore how attackers behave during shoulder surfing. Unfortunately, such behavior is challenging to study as it is often opportunistic and can occur wherever potential attackers can observe other people's private screens. Therefore, we investigate shoulder surfing using virtual reality (VR). We recruited 24 participants and observed their behavior in two virtual waiting scenarios: at a bus stop and in an open office space. In both scenarios, avatars interacted with private screens displaying different content, thus providing opportunities for shoulder surfing. From the results, we derive an understanding of factors influencing shoulder surfing behavior.