Bachelor Thesis

Mind-body therapies draw upon body awareness to boost well-being, and VR has recently found its way into these therapy approaches. An inherent limitation of VR is latency, which can cause a delay between a user’s physical movements and the corresponding movements in the VR environment. Our study thus investigates whether such latency has an impact on body awareness and the sense of embodiment.

This thesis investigates whether embodiment exercises performed in front of a virtual mirror affect the embodiment illusion, body awareness, and mindfulness. Subjects embody non-photorealistic, personalized avatars and perform body awareness exercises in virtual rality either with or without a mirror.

This bachelor thesis explores how the appearance of an avatar developed for a virtual mindfulness exercise should look like. In addition, a set of attributes in relation to mindfulness is evaluated in order to find attributes that contribute to a mindful first impression.

Critical training situations induce stress, and pilots must learn to cope with it. The Bachelor theses investigate if virtual stress simulation has similar effects to stress induction in a physical training setting. Could the Virtual Twin induce sufficient stress to train critical incidences?

The theses compare expensive physical flight simulators to their cheaper Virtual Reality Twin concerning flight performance, attention guiding, situational awareness, and immersion. Could the Virtual Reality alternative replace or reform the way we train pilots in the future?

This thesis implements an AR-Action Game for drivers of autonomous vehicles and evaluates the potential of spatial attentional guidance by NPCs to reduce motion sickness.

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.