Deutsch

XR & Spatial Interaction

Focus areas:

  • XR technologies (Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality)
  • User Experience (UX) in immersive environments
  • Digital twins and spatial interaction
  • Interaction modalities: eye tracking, gesture, hand tracking, voice control
  • Emotions, presence, and trust in XR applications

We explore how immersive technologies such as Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality can enhance human-computer interaction across a range of contexts. Our research focuses on designing and evaluating user interfaces, interaction paradigms, and system architectures that foster intuitive, engaging, and effective experiences. We investigate factors like spatial presence, embodiment, trust, and social acceptability—especially in collaborative, mobile, or public settings. Application domains include immersive navigation, education, retail, and cultural heritage, as well as simulations for training and decision-making. Through empirical studies and iterative prototyping, we aim to create XR systems that are not only technically robust but also socially meaningful and accessible.

Related projects:

Interaction beyond the controller

A controller is the least interesting way into a virtual environment. We put hand tracking, voice, gaze and passthrough against each other inside the same task, so that the comparison says something about the modality rather than about the study it came from. What we look for is not which one wins, but what each one costs the person using it: attention, precision, fatigue, and the willingness to use it with other people in the room. The multimodal comparison of hand tracking, voice and passthrough received the Best Paper Award at the MMVE workshop of ACM MMSys.

Being present together

Collaboration in extended reality breaks in specific, reproducible ways, and those are the ones worth measuring. We study what happens when one person is physically present and the other is not, how close an avatar may come before proximity becomes uncomfortable, and how much spatial misalignment or delay a shared augmented scene tolerates before two people stop treating it as one space. Presence, trust and social acceptability are measured rather than assumed, and reported with the conditions under which they hold — including cultural background, which changes the experience of the same environment.

Finding the way

Navigation is where extended reality meets the street. We test audio and visual guidance outdoors: spatialised sound against visual cues, one device against another, cue design against the situation it is used in — because a cue that works along a corridor can fail at a junction. The measures are the ones that matter for walking: performance, workload, confidence, and whether the person keeps their eyes where the traffic is.

Public space, industry and digital twins

Systems built for public space and for industry have to survive distraction and constraint. We evaluate extended reality under interruption and in rooms smaller than the interaction was designed for, and we build interactive digital twins that stay usable when model and reality drift apart — controlling unmanned aerial vehicles from different viewpoints inside a twin, or inspecting infrastructure captured in the field. This is where the line meets safety-critical training, and where the question becomes responsibility rather than usability alone.

Selected work