ARIA
Artificial Realities and Interactive Ambients
The ARIA team is a new initiative and is part of the HCI Research Group of KU Leuven. Our research studies the behaviour of users in interactive Virtual Environments, with the aim of improving their experience.
Prospective students interested in working on a Master's Thesis within the ARIA team can find more information in the related link or via the the About menu.
Our Research
ACM CHI 2022
Immersive Speculative Enactments: Bringing Future Scenarios and Technology to Life Using Virtual Reality
In this paper we present Immersive Speculative Enactments (ISEs), a novel concept that extends conventional Speculative Enactments to Virtual Reality. Through ISEs, participants are immersed in a speculative world depicted by the designers and can engage with it in its truest envisioned form. We explore this concept via four scenarios with increasing technological uncertainty: a glimpse in the daily life of the parent of a newborn baby; a Mixed Reality experience supporting hybrid classrooms; two wearable devices that present a pet’s emotional state and needs; and an enactment on the effect of communication delay across interplanetary distances. We discuss the concept of ISEs and contrast them to other forms of speculation, provide guidelines on how to design them, as well as reflecting on the challenges, limitations, and potential associated with the role of ISEs in the HCI discourse.
IEEE VR 2020
The Space Bender: Supporting Natural Walking via Overt Manipulation of the Virtual Environment
Manipulating the appearance of a Virtual Environment to enable natural walking has so far focused on modifications that are intended to be unnoticed by users. In our research, we took a radically different approach by embracing the overt nature of the change. To explore this method, we designed the Space Bender, a natural walking technique for room-scale VR. It builds on the idea of overtly manipulating the Virtual Environment by “bending” the geometry whenever the user comes in proximity of a physical boundary
ACM SUI 2019
LIVE: the Human Role while Learning in an Immersive Virtual Environment
This work studies the role of a human instructor within an immersive VR lesson. We conducted a between-subjects user study with two groups of students: one experienced the VR lesson while immersed together with an instructor; the other experienced the same contents demonstrated through animation sequences simulating the actions that the instructor would take.
IEEE TVCG 2017
Altering User Movement Behaviour in Virtual Environments
In immersive Virtual Reality systems, users tend to move in a Virtual Environment as they would in an analogous physical environment. In this work, we investigated how user behaviour is affected when the Virtual Environment differs from the physical space.