Understanding Young People’s Creative Goals with Augmented RealityYoung people are major consumers of Augmented Reality (AR) tools like Pokémon GO, but they rarely engage in creating these experiences. Creating with technology gives young people a platform for expressing themselves and making social connections. However, we do not know what young people want to create with AR, as existing AR authoring tools are largely designed for adults. To investigate the requirements for an AR authoring tool, we ran eight design workshops with 17 young people in Argentina and the United States that centered on young people’s perspectives and experiences. We identified four ways in which young people want to create with AR, and contribute the following design implications for designers of AR authoring tools for young people: (1) Blending imagination into AR scenarios to preserve narratives, (2) Making traces of actions visible to foster social presence (3) Exploring how AR artifacts can serve as invitations to connect with others, and (4) Leveraging information asymmetry to encourage learning about the physical world.2025ALAmna Liaqat et al.Perspectives on VRCSCW
SocialMiXR: Facilitating Hybrid Social Interactions at ConferencesHybrid options at conferences, which support in-person and remote attendance, have increasingly become the norm in order to broaden participation and promote sustainability. However, hybrid conferences are challenging, where in-person and remote attendees often have disjoint, parallel experiences with limited opportunity to interact with each other. To explore the potential for facilitating social interaction between in-person and remote conference attendees, we designed and built SocialMiXR, a research prototype that uses WebXR technologies to align the physical and virtual worlds into one hybrid space for socialization. We deployed SocialMiXR in a three-day field study with 14 in-person and remote attendees of an engineering conference. Our qualitative results demonstrate that participants felt they were together in the same conference experience, and formed meaningful connections with each other. At the same time, they faced difficulties balancing different realities and capabilities given their separate contexts. We discuss implications for the design of hybrid social experiences at conferences.2025FLFannie Liu et al.Hybrid WorkCSCW
Students’ Privacy and Ethical Concerns of Using Social Virtual Worlds for Online LearningSocial virtual worlds provide students in remote online courses a unique approach to collaborative work and social interactions. However, the use of social virtual worlds in online learning raises concern about what privacy and ethical issues students might encounter. To shed light on this topic, we examined college students’ (N = 68) ethical and privacy concerns of using social virtual worlds across multiple class sessions, courses, universities, virtual environments, and technologies. Students revealed (a) struggling to manage their identity between classmates and strangers, (b) discomfort over violations of their avatars’ personal space, (c) issues of vulnerable populations experiencing harassment, nudity, and loneliness, and (d) concern over companies tracking and storing user data. In addition, students described the technological affordances that mitigated their privacy and ethical concerns. We discuss the implications of our findings for the future of collaborative learning and the design of social virtual worlds.2025JBJakki O. Bailey et al.Perspectives on VRCSCW
Growing Together at Work: Cultivating a Mentorship GardenWorkplace mentorship is critical for career advancement, sense of belonging, and well-being. However, historically marginalized groups face barriers to effective mentorship including misaligned commitments, difficulty establishing comfort with mentors, and relationship persistence. We explore how 3D virtual environment (VE) counterspaces, or spaces that center the well-being of marginalized people, can circumnavigate these barriers and generate dedicated environments for workplace mentorship. We present Mentorship Garden: a digital counterspace designed to facilitate mentorship communication around commitments, goals, progress, and well-being. We deployed Mentorship Garden with 10 mentor-mentee pairs, recruited from DEI mentoring programs at a large global company, and interviewed them about their experiences. Overall, Mentorship Garden provided a relaxing space for participants to engage in rituals supporting historically marginalized individuals via mentorship, but revealed potential challenges in seamlessly integrating it in the workplace. We discuss design implications for creating virtual mentorship counterspaces in the workplace and opportunities for future research.2025ECErica Principe Cruz et al.Collaborating in Virtual EnvironmentsCSCW
A Novel Lens on Metacognition in VisualizationMetacognition, or the awareness and regulation of one's own cognitive processes, allows individuals to take command of their learning and decision making in various contexts. In tasks that require problem-solving and adaptive learning, individuals with heightened metacognitive awareness tend to outperform others, as they are better equipped to regulate cognition, leading to more effective processes. On the other hand, visualization research facilitates exploration and decision making with data. We posit that metacognitive frameworks that examine how individuals think about their own thinking processes can likewise enhance visualization processes. In this paper, we review metacognition literature from the cognitive and learning science to identify opportunities in visualization to improve people's ability to reason with data. We propose the use of a metacognitive framework, serving as a starting point to inspire future research to improve visualization practices and outcomes.2025MCMengyu Chen et al.Emory University, Computer ScienceInteractive Data VisualizationVisualization Perception & CognitionCHI
Examining the Effects of Immersive and Non-Immersive Presenter Modalities on Engagement and Social Interaction in Co-located Augmented PresentationsHead-worn augmented reality (AR) allows audiences to be immersed and engaged in stories told by live presenters. While presenters may also be in AR to have the same level of immersion and awareness as their audience, this symmetric presentation style may diminish important social cues such as eye contact. In this work, we examine the effects this (a)symmetry has on engagement, group awareness, and social interaction in co-located one-on-one augmented presentations. We developed a presentation system incorporating 2D/3D content that audiences can view and interact with in AR, with presenters controlling and delivering the presentation in either a symmetric style in AR, or an asymmetric style with a handheld tablet. We conducted a within- and between-subjects evaluation with 12 participant pairs to examine the differences between these symmetric and asymmetric presentation modalities. From our findings, we extracted four themes and derived strategies and guidelines for designers interested in augmented presentations.2025MGMatt Gottsacker et al.J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Global Technology Applied Research; University of Central Florida, SREALAR Navigation & Context AwarenessInteractive Narrative & Immersive StorytellingCHI
Shortchanged: Uncovering and Analyzing Intimate Partner Financial Abuse in Consumer ComplaintsDigital financial services can introduce new digital-safety risks for users, particularly survivors of intimate partner financial abuse (IPFA). To offer improved support for such users, a comprehensive understanding of their support needs and the barriers they face to redress by financial institutions is essential. Drawing from a dataset of 2.7 million customer complaints, we implement a bespoke workflow that utilizes language-modeling techniques and expert human review to identify complaints describing IPFA. Our mixed-method analysis provides insight into the most common digital financial products involved in these attacks, and the barriers consumers report encountering when doing so. Our contributions are twofold; we offer the first human-labeled dataset for this overlooked harm and provide practical implications for technical practice, research, and design for better supporting and protecting survivors of IPFA.2024ABArkaprabha Bhattacharya et al.JPMorgan ChaseAI Ethics, Fairness & AccountabilitySTEM Education & Science CommunicationAlgorithmic Fairness & BiasCHI