RICELab Rethinking Interaction Collaboration and Engagement

Meeting through a screen or a headset removes cues that people rely on without noticing: where someone is looking, or what they are pointing at. We build interfaces that put some of those cues back, and evaluate them with pairs and groups doing realistic tasks.

Seeing yourself in a meeting

Video meetings show you your own face for the whole duration of the conversation. In FaceValue [Park, G., Tang, A., and Chevalier, F. (2026). FaceValue: Exploring Real-Time Self-View Overlays to Prompt Meaning-Oriented Self-Awareness in Remote Meetings. In Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction.] we designed real-time overlays on that self-view, intended to prompt meaning-oriented self-awareness rather than appearance-oriented self-consciousness, and studied how they changed what people attended to while meeting.

Presenting in mixed reality

A presenter gestures for two audiences at once: the people in the room and the system that is tracking them. We built JollyGesture as a VR technology probe that recognises dual-purpose gestures, and ran a design study in which twelve participants delivered a mock presentation with it and then imagined gestures of their own [Park, G., Tang, A., and Chevalier, F. (2024). JollyGesture: Exploring Dual-Purpose Gestures in VR Presentations. In Graphics Interface 2024 Second Deadline.] . Two further experiments on mixed-reality presentations tested where to place the scene camera, whether to overlay the presenter’s first-person view, and whether to highlight the objects they are looking at. From those we derived guidelines for configuring such presentations [Vo, N., Thai, V., Hoai Do, N., Huynh, V., Tang, A., and Le, K. (2025). Enhancing Spatial Understanding in Mixed-Reality Presentations. In Proceedings of the 2025 31st ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology, 60.] .

Asymmetric collaboration

In practice, not everyone in a room is wearing a headset, so participants have unequal access to the shared virtual content. We built two techniques for letting a non-HMD user point at mixed-reality content, and evaluated them with 18 pairs working through an expert-novice collaboration task [Vo, N., Thai, V., Tang, A., and Le, K. (2026). Enhancing Pointing Gestures of Non-HMD Users in Asymmetric Collocated Mixed Reality Collaboration. In Proceedings of the 2026 International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI '26).] .

Open problems

With 29 colleagues from the visualization and HCI communities, we characterised sixteen open challenges in remote, synchronous collaboration around visualization, anchored in five activities where visualization and multimodal communication are central [Brehmer, M., Cordeil, M., Hurter, C., Itoh, T., Büschel, W., Jasim, M., Prouzeau, A., Saffo, D., Bartram, L., Carpendale, S., Zhu-Tian, C., Cunningham, A., Dwyer, T., Huron, S., Itoh, M., Joshi, A., Kiyokawa, K., Kuzuoka, H., Lee, B., Molina León, G., Reiterer, H., Ryskeldiev, B., Schwabish, J., Smith, B., Sumi, Y., Suzuki, R., Tang, A., Yang, Y., and Zhao, J. (2026). Challenges in Synchronous & Remote Collaboration Around Visualization. In Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26).] .

Publications