Student Projects

How should social VR applications be designed to support and promote intercultural and transcultural competencies and sensitivity? This work will contribute to the evaluation of how different immersive features of (social) VR affect inter- and transcultural competence and sensitivity. Different approaches will be investigated. Does the representation of the virtual environment or the embodiments of peers influence facets of intercultural competence, such as acceptance of stereotypes or tolerance for ambiguity? Can implicit stereotypical behaviors be deduced with the help of virtual objects?

The aim of my work is to create a basis for the question whether virtual reality (VR) and virtual embodiment can be a suitable medium to treat disturbances of sensory body awareness. This involves a series of investigations that examine (a) how and to what extend VR can draw attention towards the physical body compared to non-VR methods and (b) the relation between body awareness and the illusion of virtual body ownership.

By research through design, I’m going to explore use and effect of Image Schema in the field of Data Physicalisation. In an iterative design research process I’m going to create design artefacts and evaluate them by qualitative methods, in order to develop an Image Schema based toolkit to support the design process of Data Physicalisation. 

This doctoral thesis mainly addresses the questions of how body dimensions of virtual representations are perceived in virtual environments and by which factors they are influenced. It investigates how exposure to virtual self-representations in virtual environments can change the perception of one's own body and how sustainable this effect is.

In virtual social interactions, embodied users' virtual representations, so-called avatars, can have different characteristics of appearance and presented behavior. This doctoral thesis aims to investigate the impact of the attributes of virtual others' avatars, with whom one has social contact in XR environments, on a user's perceived quality of communication, and possibly also his/her self-perception.

Today's virtual environments offer only limited sensory modalities, especially for collaborative manual tasks this can become a complex challenge for participants involved. This thesis deals with the development and analysis of sensor substitution techniques to increase usability and UX in collaborative tasks within a distributed virtual environment.

In this work, intuitive use is defined as the extent to which a product can be used in a mentally efficient and effective manner, which is accompanied by a strong metacognitive feeling of fluency. Since available methods for the formative and summative evaluation of intuitive use lack sufficiently high time efficiency, this work proposes two new rhythm based evaluation methods for intuitive use using the secondary task paradigm: 1) IntuiBeat-F as a formative method and 2) IntuiBeat-S as a summative method.

Professional negotiations can have a significant impact on one's personal future, and a lack of negotiation skills can negatively influence salary and contract conditions. Virtual Reality (VR) training with embodied intelligent agents as negotiation partners can improve negotiation skills. Based on a professional negotiation scenario, the developed VR application can be used to train negotiation skills, as well as research aspects of human-agent interaction.

Empathy, especially affective Empathy, is known to be an effective inhibitor of cyberbullying actions. Therefore this thesis elaborates how to foster Empathy in the context mentioned using Virtual Reality as a medium and Personal Space Invasions as a stylistic mean to transport the feeling of Cybervictims.

From day to day navigation tasks become more complicated and stressful. One promising technology supporting driver safety and providing good user experience is augmented reality. This thesis develops and evaluates innovative augmented reality concepts for navigation tasks.

Does a crossmedial assembly assistance system - combining smart glasses and tablet computer - facilitate procedural instructions for a manual bike part assembly? A prototype system was built and evaluated to examine synergy effects of the devices.

Immersive technologies offer effective facilitators for effective and sustainable behavioral change - an example: "I feel that I can do it in VR, so I can do it in reality" (high feeling of effectiveness and control). VR can, for instance, be used as a new and innovative intervention to reduce the attitude-behavior gap. By altering the perspective and/or the interactivity, the individual feeling of effectiveness and thus the individual environmental behavior should be strengthened. 

In the future, autonomous vehicles will enable motorists to no longer have to concentrate on traffic. As passengers, former car drivers will be able to use their time while driving for other purposes, such as the consumption of media content. This thesis deals with the possible application of technologies and methods from the research area of virtual reality (VR) in an autonomous driving vehicle.

In this thesis an interactive carbon footprint calculator is developed, which gives users immersive feedback about their carbon dioxide emission. Besides calculating the individual carbon footprint, changes for future pro-environmental actions are designed.

Attention A.I. helps to manage drivers’ attention between the joyful experience of watching a video on a head-up display and the safety of monitoring the driving environment in automated vehicles. The system predicts when drivers are likely to switch their attention due to events outside of the vehicle by using machine learning and compares them with the actual behaviour to decide if an intervention is necessary.

Wouldn't you like to be able to ask for guidance when facing a complex problem or when the solution is not obvious? Powerful AI and a voice-based natural language interface could one day make this a reality. This thesis investigates if the presence of a smart speaker causes an observer effect (i.e. social facilitation | inhibition effect) and if such an effect extends to creative problem-solving.

The bachelor thesis evaluates different coping and mood regulation strategies presented by a conversational agent (built with BOTfriends X). It investigates the impact of the agent's characteristics and personality traits on change behavior while giving the users advice on coping with the challenging times of the ongoing covid-19 pandemic.

Recent research suggests that non-experts have incomplete mental models about smart speakers which can lead to privacy and security threats. Addressing their shortcomings using a competence learning program might support users in their decision-making process regarding privacy and data sovereignty.

Source credibility is an important part of every journalistic report. The MAIN-Model of Sundar (2008) proposes that credibility can be enhanced by increasing different affordances like agency or interactivity. In this work interactive elements, like info-hotspots, were added to a journalistic 360° video with the goal to create a more credible contribution.

Special trust in such systems is required for the retrieval of personal data such as illnesses by voice assistants. In cooperation with the startup vuemondo, the project aims to find out how language assistants need to be designed to inspire this trust.

In this thesis, the social interaction with robots in an industrial context is investigated under consideration of the media equation, whereby the influence and the emergence of "social presence" are particularly relevant. The impact of social interaction on employee productivity and work climate is also considered.

The aim of this project is to explore whether embodying an avatar with increased attractiveness influences self-esteem. To increase the avatar's attractiveness, the participants can modify the body weight of their avatar to match their ideal. We implement a mirror exposure in virtual reality (VR), where participants will embody personalized photorealistic avatars configured to their self-defined ideal body weight.

This project investigates the comparability of eye-tracking data in the real world, as well as in virtual reality in the context of visual body perception. Highlighting the differences in gaze behavior between both fields is important for the use of eye-tracking in future virtual reality applications.

Research goal of this project is to examine whether the extension of interactivity in a 360 degree video has a positive effect on credibility, story recall and story sharing intention. Interactive Elements such as info hotspots and scene switch buttons were designed following the MAIN Model by Sundar (2008), which proposes a heuristic approach of understanding credibility of digital media.