Dr. Yuki Onishi

Current voice agents wait for a user to complete their verbal instruction before responding; yet, this is misaligned with how humans engage in everyday conversational interaction, where interlocutors use multimodal signaling (e.g. nodding, grunting, or looking at referred to objects) to ensure conversational grounding. We designed an embodied VR agent that exhibits multimodal signaling behaviors in response to situated prompts, by turning its head, or by visually highlighting objects being discussed or referred to. We explore how people prompt this agent to design and manipulate the objects in a VR scene. Through a Wizard of Oz study, we found that participants interacting with an agent that indicated its understanding of spatial and action references were able to prevent errors 30% of the time, and were more satisfied and confident in the agent’s abilities. These findings underscore the importance of designing multimodal signaling communication techniques for future embodied agents.

Generative AI tools can provide people with the ability to create virtual environments and scenes with natural language prompts. Yet, how people will formulate such prompts is unclear—particularly when they inhabit the environment that they are designing. For instance, it is likely that a person might say, “Put a chair here,” while pointing at a location. If such linguistic and embodied features are common to people’s prompts, we need to tune models to accommodate them. In this work, we present a Wizard of Oz elicitation study with 22 participants, where we studied people’s implicit expectations when verbally prompting such programming agents to create interactive VR scenes. Our findings show when people prompted the agent, they had several implicit expectations of these agents: (1) they should have an embodied knowledge of the environment; (2) they should understand embodied prompts by users; (3) they should recall previous states of the scene and the conversation, and that (4) they should have a commonsense understanding of objects in the scene. Further, we found that participants prompted differently when they were prompting in situ (i.e. within the VR environment) versus ex situ (i.e. viewing the VR environment from the outside). To explore how these lessons could be applied, we designed and built Ostaad, a conversational programming agent that allows non-programmers to design interactive VR experiences that they inhabit. Based on these explorations, we outline new opportunities and challenges for conversational programming agents that create VR environments.

Gaining extensive practice in anesthesia procedures is critical for medical students. However, the current high-fidelity simulators for clinical anesthesia practice limit such vital opportunities due to their professional-level functions, large size, and high installation costs. In this paper, we propose Anesth-on-the-Go, a portable game-based anesthesia simulator that allows medical students to repeatedly practice clinical anesthesia procedures anywhere, anytime on a conventional personal computer. The proposed simulator is designed for medical students, and it allows them to manipulate controls appropriately for various anesthesia procedures according to pre-determined surgical scenarios. Based on iterative interviews with clinical anesthesia instructors, we designed a simulation interface with four key components: 1) a monitor, 2) a decision-making board, 3) a surgical field view, and 4) a communication view. As our initial evaluation, we introduced the simulator in the training curriculum for medical students and verified its effect on their proficiency level in subsequent training with high-fidelity simulation. The results show that individual and prior training with our simulator improved each student’s overall performance (i.e., score) and stimulated discussion among teammates during the subsequent formal training. The evaluation’s findings also indicate that the simulator experience can facilitate post-training reflection.

Room-scale VR has been considered an alternative to physical office workspaces. For office activities, users frequently require planar input methods, such as typing or handwriting, to quickly record annotations to virtual content. However, current off-the-shelf VR HMD setups rely on mid-air interactions, which can cause arm fatigue and decrease input accuracy. To address this issue, we propose UbiSurface, a robotic touch surface that can automatically reposition itself to physically present a virtual planar input surface (VR whiteboard, VR canvas, etc.) to users and to permit them to achieve accurate and fatigue-less input while walking around a virtual room. We design and implement a prototype of UbiSurface that can dynamically change a canvas-sized touch surface's position, height, and pitch and yaw angles to adapt to virtual surfaces spatially arranged at various locations and angles around a virtual room. We then conduct studies to validate its technical performance and examine how UbiSurface facilitates the user's primary mid-air planar interactions, such as painting and writing in a room-scale VR setup. Our results indicate that this system reduces arm fatigue and increases input accuracy, especially for writing tasks. We then discuss the potential benefits and challenges of robotic touch devices for future room-scale VR setups. 

We propose WaddleWalls, a room-scale interactive partitioning system using a swarm of robotic partitions that allows occupants to interactively reconfigure workspace partitions to satisfy their privacy and interaction needs. The system can automatically arrange the partitions' layout designed by the user on demand. The user specifies the target partition's position, orientation, and height using the controller's 3D manipulations. In this work, we discuss the design considerations of the interactive partition system and implement WaddleWalls' proof-of-concept prototype assembled with off-the-shelf materials. We demonstrate the functionalities of WaddleWalls through several application scenarios in an open-planned office environment. Through initial user evaluation and interview with experts, we clarify the feasibility, potential, and future challenges of WaddleWalls.

We propose a self-actuated stretchable partition whose physical height, width, and position can dynamically change to create secure workplaces (e.g., against privacy and infectious risks) without inhibiting group collaboration. To support secure workplace layouts and space reconfigurations, the partitions’ height, length, and position are adapted automatically and dynamically. We implement a proof-of concept prototype with a height-adjustable stand, a roll-up screen, and a mobile robot. We then show some example application scenarios to discuss potential future actuated-territorial offices.

We explore BouncyScreen, an actuated 1D display system that enriches indirect interaction with a virtual object by pseudo-haptic feedback mechanics enhanced through the screen's physical movements. When the user manipulates a virtual object using virtual reality (VR) controllers, the screen moves in accordance with the virtual object. We configured a proof-of-concept prototype of BouncyScreen with a flat-screen mounted on a mobile robot. The psychophysical study confirmed that the screen's synchronous physical motions significantly enhance the reality of the interaction and the sense of presence.

Living Wall Display displays interactive content on a mobile wall screen that moves in concern with content animation. In addition to the audio-visual information, the display dynamically changes its position and orientation, responding to the content animation triggered by user interactions for augmentaion of the intaraction experience. We implement three proof of concept prototypes (FPS Shooting Game, Drive Simulation, Baseball Pitching Simulation) that represent pseudo force impact of the interactive content using physical screen movement.

We present “Be Bait!”, a unique virtual fishing experience that allows the user to become a bait by lying on the hammocks, instead of holding a fishing rod. We implement the hammock-based locomotion method with haptic feedback mechanisms. In our demonstration, users can enjoy exploring a virtual underwater world and fighting with fishes in direct and intuitive ways.