Demonstrations that include virtual reality (VR) technologies are becoming increasingly common in research contexts. All included roles within a demonstration experience (facilitators, participants, and spectators) take up different responsibilities to be able to run through a VR demonstration as intended. VR head-mounted displays (HMDs) are particularly difficult to demonstrate with considering the participant’s restricted vision of their surroundings and the facilitator. There is limited HCI research that has analyzed interactions between the roles of a demonstrations when using VR HMDs. Therefore, this study explores how these roles address the challenges that arise during VR demonstrations. With a video-analytic approach, we gathered data from live demonstrations from an ACM conference in 2024. To articulate the data gathered, we encompass the concepts of breakdown and repair, alignment and common ground, and progressivity. Our findings highlight five forms of alignment work: procedural, technological, conversational, visual, and physical alignment, as well as preemptive repurposed conversational repair strategies. This paper’s main contribution is the forms of alignment that provide discourse tools for analyzing alignment work interactions and understanding them in the context of VR demonstrations. Additionally, this research provides actionable guidelines aiding VR-experience organizers as a way to limit breakdowns and arrested progressivity in their demonstrations, applicable in context from lab-based experiments to public exhibitions. These guidelines include to inform sequentiality, inform about differences in interactions and technologies, preempt physical surroundings, and negotiate touch. We conclude by encouraging future research to explore implications of designing for interactions and designing for specific demonstration roles.

This paper examines the collaborative work of residents, housing associations, and property owners to manage household waste in the context of a multi-apartment housing complex. Framed within the feminist ecological perspective of digital environmental stewardship - that is, how diverse actors, motivations, and capacities producing care for the environment that can be digitally mediated - we unpack how the many involved actors work together to keep waste in place, maintain the local waste system, and call on 'responsibility' as a means to produce sustainable actions and accountability. We frame these practices of waste management within the mundane work of sociotechnical innovation. Borrowing from Jackson's notion of repair work, we weave together an argument for the novel and valuable contribution to CSCW sustainability research grounded in the everyday contingent emergencies of environmental care. We argue for approaches to sustainability that reflect both the work to maintain sustainability -not just to produce it- and aspects of the 'good enough', a locally and reflexively produced equilibrium between maintenance and repair. We conclude by discussing their relevance for the design of sociotechnical interventions that mediate practices of care in waste management.

When learning programming concepts, beginners face challenges that lead to decreased motivation, Game-Based Learning (GBL) uses game principles to make learning more engaging, and VR has been explored as a way to enhance GBL further. This paper explores the impact of Virtual Reality (VR) on learning programming, and we developed Codeseum to compare whether VR-based learning is perceived as more engaging and usable than a desktop game counterpart. The experiment with ten participants included data from questionnaires, interviews, and structured observations. The quantitative analysis indicated that VR was perceived as inducing higher focused attention, aesthetic appeal, and reward, while the thematic analysis provided discussion elements of seven themes, including interaction, engagement, and physical expressions from the participants. Overall, the desktop application had better accessibility, whereas the immersive interactions from Codeseum in VR induced higher levels of enjoyment and engagement. Our study contributes insights into the potential of VR in education, mainly teaching coding skills in engaging ways, and ofers information to adopt immersive technologies in teaching practice.

This work-in-progress presents the design of an XR prototype for the purpose of educating basic cybersecurity concepts. We have designed an experimental virtual reality cyberspace to visualise data traffic over network, enabling the user to interact with VR representations of data packets. Our objective was to help the user better conceptualise abstract cybersecurity topics such as encryption and decryption, firewall and malicious data. Additionally, to better stimuli the sense of immersion we have used Peltier thermoelectric modules and Arduino Uno to experiment with multisensory XR. Furthermore, we reflect on early evaluation of this experimental prototype and present potential paths for future improvements.

Recent developments in gaze tracking present new opportunities for social computing. This paper presents a study of Tama, a gaze actuated smart speaker. Tama was designed taking advantage of research on gaze in conversation. Rather than being activated with a wake word (such as "Ok Google") Tama detects the gaze of a user, moving an articulated 'head' to achieve mutual gaze. We tested Tama's use in a multi-party conversation task, with users successfully activating and receiving a response to over 371 queries (over 10 trials). When Tama worked well, there was no significant difference in length of interaction. However, interactions with Tama had a higher rate of repeated queries, causing longer interactions overall. Video analysis lets us explain the problems users had interacting with gaze. In the discussion, we describe implications for designing new gaze systems, using gaze both as input and output. We also discuss how the relationship to anthropomorphic design and taking advantage of learned skills of interaction. Finally, two paths for future work are proposed, one in the field of speech agents, and the second in using human gaze as an interaction modality more widely.

While gaze is an important part of human to human interaction, it has been neglected in the design of conversational agents. In this paper, we report on our experiments with adding gaze to a conventional speech agent system. Tama is a speech agent that makes use of users' gaze to initiate a query, rather than a wake word or phrase. In this paper, we analyse the patterns of detected gaze when interacting with the device. We use k-means clustering of the log data from ten users tested in a dual-participant discussion tasks. These patterns are verified and explained through close analysis of the video data of the trials. We present similarities of patterns between conditions both when querying the agent and listening to the answers. We also present the analysis of patterns detected when only in the gaze condition. Users can take advantage of their understanding of gaze in conversation to interact with a gaze-enabled agent but are also able to fluently adjust their use of gaze to interact with the technology successfully. Our results point to some patterns of interaction which can be used as a starting point to build gaze-awareness into voice-user interfaces.