Conferences / Publications
Eagan, L. M., Young, J., Bering, J., & Langlotz, T. (2025, April). Virtual voyages: Evaluating the role of real-time and narrated virtual tours in shaping user experience and memories. In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-19).
Immersive technologies are capable of transporting people to distant or inaccessible environments that they might not otherwise visit.
Practitioners and researchers alike are discovering new ways to replicate and enhance existing tourism experiences using virtual reality, yet few controlled experiments have studied how users perceive virtual tours of real-world locations.
In this paper we present an initial exploration of a new system for virtual tourism, measuring the effects of real-time experiences and storytelling on presence, place attachment, and user memories of the destination.
Our results suggest that narrative plays an important role in inducing presence within and attachment to the destination, while livestreaming can further increase place attachment while providing flexible, tailored experiences.
We discuss the design and evaluation of our system, including feedback from our tourism partners, and provide insights into current limitations and further opportunities for virtual tourism.
Schieber, H., Young, J., Langlotz, T., Zollmann, S., & Roth, D. (2025, March). Semantics-controlled gaussian splatting for outdoor scene reconstruction and rendering in virtual reality. In 2025 IEEE Conference Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR) (pp. 318-328). IEEE.
Advancements in 3D rendering like Gaussian Splatting (GS) allow novel view synthesis and real-time rendering in virtual reality (VR). However, GS-created 3D environments are often difficult to edit. For scene enhancement or to incorporate 3D assets, segmenting Gaussians by class is essential.
Existing segmentation approaches are typically limited to certain types of scenes, e.g., "circular" scenes, to determine clear object boundaries. However, this method is ineffective when removing large objects in non-"circling" scenes such as large outdoor scenes.
We propose Semantics-Controlled GS (SCGS), a segmentation-driven GS approach, enabling the separation of large scene parts in uncontrolled, natural environments. SCGS allows scene editing and the extraction of scene parts for VR. Additionally, we introduce a challenging outdoor dataset, overcoming the "circling" setup.
We outperform the state-of-the-art in visual quality on our dataset and in segmentation quality on the 3D-OVS dataset. We conducted an exploratory user study, comparing a 360-video, plain GS, and SCGS in VR with a fixed viewpoint. In our subsequent main study, users were allowed to move freely, evaluating plain GS and SCGS. Our main study results show that participants clearly prefer SCGS over plain GS.
We overall present an innovative approach that surpasses the state-of-the-art both technically and in user experience.
Tran, T. Q., Langlotz, T., Young, J., Schubert, T. W., & Regenbrecht, H. (2024). Classifying presence scores: Insights and analysis from two decades of the igroup presence questionnaire (ipq). ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 31(5), 1-26.
Presence, or the experience of being present in a computer-generated environment, is a defining element of virtual reality. While there are different methodologies to measure presence, questionnaires remain the most popular, particularly the Igroup Presence Questionnaire (IPQ).
In this article, we analyse the results of over 20 years of IPQ usage to develop a new comparative means of reporting presence scores and comparing them across existing and future work.
We additionally report on correct and problematic usage of the questionnaire and, through this, present guidelines on how to administer the IPQ in future to aid further analysis.
Finally, we present a new web-based tool to streamline the analysis and reporting of IPQ results, which we hope will facilitate more standardised usage of the questionnaire in future research.
Tran, T. Q., Langlotz, T., & Regenbrecht, H. (2024, May). A survey on measuring presence in mixed reality. In Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-38).
Presence is a defning element of virtual reality (VR), but it is also increasingly used when assessing mixed reality (MR) experiences. The increased interest in measuring presence in MR and recent works underpinning the specifc nature of presence in MR raise the question of the current state and practice of assessing presence in MR.
To address this question, we present an analysis of more than 320 studies that report on presence measurements in MR.
Our analysis showed that questionnaires are the dominant measurement but also identify problematic trends that stem from the lack of a generally agreed-upon concept or measurement for presence in MR. More specifcally, we show that using measurements that are not validated in MR or custom questionnaires limiting the comparability of results is commonplace and could contribute to a looming replication crisis in an increasingly relevant feld.
Davis, L. S., Finkler, W., Lo, W. H., Rabbidge, M., Zhu, L., & Zollmann, S. (2024, March). 360 storytelling for immersive teaching online and in the classroom for secondary and tertiary education. In 2024 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW) (pp. 935-936). IEEE.
In this work, we present the findings of a study designed to investigate the impact of 360° videos on student engagement and learning outcomes in both secondary and tertiary educational contexts.
The research focused on two distinct scenarios: Teaching Science to Secondary School Students and Hybrid University Courses integrating On-campus and Distant Students.
The study employed a multifaceted approach, combining video production, test protocols, and evaluations to assess the efficacy of 360° videos.
