Benjamin Weyers

• Univ.-Prof. Dr.-Ing.
• Professor (Full) at Trier University

The Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) has become one of the most frequently employed laboratory stressors in human studies over the past decades. Several TSST adaptations for the presentation in virtual reality (VR) have been introduced and evaluated recently. Here, we describe a freely available version, the Open TSST-VR. In two independent studies,...

The Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) has become one of the most frequently employed laboratory stressors in human studies over the past decades. Several TSST adaptations for the presentation in virtual reality (VR) have been introduced and evaluated recently. Here we describe a freely available version, the Open TSST-VR. In two independent studies,...

Pointing-based teleportation over short distances is a widely used locomotion technique in virtual reality (VR) due to its ability to minimize cybersickness compared to continuous movement methods. Further, teleportation transitions, the visual effects that mediate the user's perspective change, play a critical role in influencing spatial orientati...

Aims: This study aims to enhance the design of augmented reality (AR) technologies for remote collaboration by examining the complex relationships among individual factors (user characteristics), psychological and physiological states during AR-mediated remote collaboration, and outcomes within an Input-Mediator-Output (IMO) model. The goal is to e...

Immersive technologies such as virtual reality and augmented reality continue to evolve, and technical advancements allow the combination of these technologies in a cross-reality approach. Therefore, understanding the different types of transition between contexts or environments becomes increasingly important. In immersive applications, transition...

Immersive authoring enables content creation for virtual environments without a break of immersion. To enable immersive authoring of reactive behavior for a broad audience, we present modulation mapping, a simplified visual programming technique. To evaluate the applicability of our technique, we investigate the role of reference frames in which th...

Virtual Reality presents a promising tool for knowledge transfer, allowing users to learn in different environments and with the help of three-dimensional visualizations. At the same time, having to learn new ways of interacting with their environment can present a significant hurdle for novice users. When users enter a virtual space to receive kno...

Collaborative work in social virtual reality often requires an interplay of loosely coupled collaboration from different virtual locations and tightly coupled face-to-face collaboration. Without appropriate system mediation, however, transitioning between these phases requires high navigation and coordination efforts. In this paper, we present an i...

Performance and user satisfaction are key quality indicators in immersive analytics. Performance in terms of, e.g., error rate can only be measured if a ground truth is known to evaluate whether a user action or analysis result is erroneous. Thus, an estimate measure is needed to indicate the user's performance without having a ground truth availab...

A fade-to-black animation enhances the transition during teleportation, yet its duration has not been systematically explored even though it is one of the central parameters. To fill this gap, we conducted a small study to determine a preferred duration. We find a short duration of 0.3 s to be the average preference, contrasting durations used prev...

The Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) has become one of the most frequently employed laboratory stressors in human studies over the past decades. Several TSST adaptations for the presentation in virtual reality (VR) have been introduced and evaluated recently. Here we describe a freely available version, the Open TSST-VR. In two independent studies,...

The user study presented in this paper explores the effects that being immersed in different virtual scenes has on a user’s avatar-design behavior. For this purpose, we have developed a character creation tool that lets users configure their appearance in Virtual Reality. This tool has then been employed in a user study involving 33 participants, w...

This tech demo offers an immersive exploration of the most prominent scene transitions within the Reality-Virtuality Continuum (RVC). It delves into the seamless integration of real and virtual worlds, showcasing a spectrum of environments ranging from entirely real to fully virtual and various transitions to switch between them. Our innovative app...

A major challenge in augmented reality applications is the occlusion of virtual objects by physical, real-world objects. Occlusion, however, is a major cue for perceiving the correct depth of objects and whether those are colliding or not. Obtaining an accurate depth perception is especially important for mid-air interactions since misperception c...

Virtual Reality has become an important medium in the automotive industry, providing engineers with a simulated platform to actively engage with and evaluate realistic driving scenarios for testing and validating automated vehicles. However, engineers are often restricted to using 2D desktop-based tools for designing driving scenarios, which can re...

The inquiry into the impact of diverse transitions between cross-reality environments on user experience remains a compelling research endeavor. Existing work often offers fragmented perspectives on various techniques or confines itself to a singular segment of the reality-virtuality spectrum, be it virtual reality or augmented reality. This study...

The use of multi-robot systems is a field that can benefit from VR by strengthening understanding of the situation and enabling seamless interaction with the actors involved. This work investigates how the usability of a design for interaction with a multi-robot system for ship maintenance is assessed. Furthermore, comments from the participants ar...

Based on the results of two laboratory studies, we show how the implementation of minimalistic social and task-relevant cues in Augmented Reality-based assistance systems for spatially dispersed teams impact team experience while not affecting team performance. In study 1 (N = 224) we investigated the Ambient Awareness Tool, which supports spatiall...

Digital transformation is both an opportunity and a challenge. To take advantage of this opportunity for humans and the environment, the transformation process must be understood as a design process that affects almost all areas of life. In this paper, we investigate AI-Based Self-Adaptive Cyber-Physical Process Systems (AI-CPPS) as an extension of...

Evaluations of digital library information systems are typically centred on users correctly, efficiently, and quickly performing predefined tasks. Additionally, users generally enjoy working with the evaluated system, and completed questionnaires show an interface's excellent user experience. However, such evaluations do not explicitly consider com...

The impact of different transitions between two virtual reality (VR) environments is still an open research question, and related work often serves only an isolated view on different techniques, i.e., with low ecological validity. The purpose of this study was to start closing this gap and evaluate the impact of six transitions while the user is so...

This edited book introduces readers to the area of “Everyday Virtual and Augmented Reality”. With Virtual and Augmented Reality technologies, becoming more pervasive in our homes and workplaces, new use cases and scenarios emerge together with new challenges that need to be addressed. These challenges encompass the design and implementation of appr...

Due to emerging consumer hardware solutions, virtual and augmented reality technologies are gaining increasing relevance in everyday contexts, such as living rooms or office spaces. This raises various challenges such as getting immersed in small and cluttered spaces, integrating immersive tools into existing processes and workflows, as well as the...

Augmented reality (AR) has been used in a large variety of scenarios from assembly support over gaming to collaborative work. Teamwork is a specific type of collaborative work and emerges in numerous everyday contexts. It is characterized (in addition to other aspects) by specific needs in terms of time-related synchronization of team members to en...

Neuronal network simulators are central to computational neuroscience, enabling the study of the nervous system through in-silico experiments. Through the utilization of high-performance computing resources, these simulators are capable of simulating increasingly complex and large networks of neurons today. Yet, the increased capabilities introduce...

Crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, pose unprecedented challenges for governmental or healthcare organizations as well as for the entire industry and the service sector. For instance, shifts in business areas due to increased infection control regulations led to overburdened or underchallenged units within the organizations. Thus, the flexible a...

It requires an elaborated set of measurements to assess how the performance of tasks conducted in VR is composed. Flow is a measurement widely used in other domains as a predictor of performance and has been shown to be positively correlated with performance. However, some previous works indicate that flow might bring different results in VR than i...

The change of the user's viewpoint in an immersive virtual environment, called locomotion, is one of the key components in a virtual reality interface. Effects of locomotion, such as simulator sickness or disorientation, depend on the specific design of the locomotion method and can influence the task performance as well as the overall acceptance o...

During crises such as COVID-19, there is a need to adapt existing work processes and teams to the changing environment in a very flexible and dynamic way in many business and healthcare organizations. In this paper, we conceptualize the advances required for Process-Oriented Case-Based Reasoning to flexibly and dynamically organize human resources...

The use of robust software engineering processes is essential in the design and development of interactive systems. This ensures that software is both functionally correct and also usable in the required context. There are a variety of software engineering techniques that can be used to consider different aspects of a system under construction, and...

Information access to bibliographic metadata needs to be uncomplicated, as users may not benefit from complex and potentially richer data that may be difficult to obtain. Sophisticated research questions including complex aggregations could be answered with complex SQL queries. However, this comes with the cost of high complexity, which requires fo...

Gathering qualitative user data in a user-centered design process is one of the very early steps to create interactive systems. However, generating structured models from qualitative data towards descriptions that can be used for the implementation of interactive systems and prototypes raises various challenges, such as a strong influence of the mo...

Continuous virtual rotation is likely one of the biggest contributors to cybersickness, while simultaneously being necessary for many VR scenarios where the user, for instance, is sitting in a bus, at an office desk, or on a couch and therefore, limited in physical body rotation. A possible solution is discrete virtual rotation, such as already bro...

Embodied locomotion, especially leaning, has one major problem. Effectively the regular functionality of the utilized body parts is over-written. Thus, in this work, we propose 6 different status control methods that seamlessly switch off (brake) a seated leaning locomo-tion interface. Different input modalities, such as a physical button, voice, a...

The project BUGWRIGHT2 is an interdisciplinary collaborative project co-funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No. 871260. The project aims to propel the digital-maritime revolution by developing an adaptable autonomous robotic solution for vessel-structure inspection and maintenance. Fro...

Psychological factors to be assessed by questionnaires, such as presence, may be influenced by variables like a break in presence induced by transitioning between physical and virtual reality - or time elapsed between the actual sensation and its measurement when questionnaires are used. Moreover, participants of previous experiments stated discomf...

Simulation software for spiking neuronal network models matured in the past decades regarding performance and flexibility. But the entry barrier remains high for students and early career scientists in computational neuroscience since these simulators typically require programming skills and a complex installation. Here, we describe an installation...

The dismantling of nuclear facilities is a continuous process of change encompassing the complete site. Thereby, the focus changes from a stable and standardized operational phase to a situation characterized by constant changes in the facility as well as in the facility organization. Thus, employees and managers are confronted with a markedly chan...

Although habits are a well-researched topic within psychology, habits enacted at the workplace received limited attention in the organizational literature. In this article we examine habits that employees show at the workplace. Because workplace habits are not always functional for performance or affective outcomes, and because employees themselves...

This workshop aims at identifying, examining, structuring and sharing educational resources and approaches to support the process of teaching/learning Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Engineering. The broadening of the range of available interaction technologies and their applications, many times in safety and mission critical areas, to novel and l...

Simulation software for spiking neuronal network models matured in the past decades regarding performance and flexibility. But the entry barrier remains high for students and early career scientists in computational neuroscience since these simulators typically require programming skills and a complex installation. Here, we describe an installation...

Task models have been used for decades in interactive system design and there are several mature modelling approaches with corresponding tool support. However, in our own work, we have also experienced their limitations, especially in situations where task models are partial ancillary models and not primary artifacts. This was one of the motivation...

Augmented and virtual reality have the potential to improve variousaspects of everyday life such as tourism. An elementary part oftourism is the organization and execution of guided city tours. Incase of tours for virtual cities, such as in the case of no longerexisting ancient settlements, a combination of augmented and virtualreality may render h...

In immersive virtual environments, locomotion allows users tochange their viewpoint in the virtual world and is one of the most common tasks. Locomotion taxonomies can describe relationships between the locomotion techniques and thus represent a common understanding, form the backbone of many studies and publications, and can increase the comparabi...

Virtual Reality is increasingly used for safe evaluation and validation of autonomous vehicles by automotive engineers. However, the design and creation of virtual testing environments is a cumbersome process. Engineers are bound to utilize desktop-based authoring tools, and a high level of expertise is necessary. By performing scene authoring enti...

Kurzfassung: Räumlich verteilt arbeitende Teams weisen häufig eine be-einträchtigte zeitliche Koordination auf, da die Teammitglieder nicht über einen gemeinsamen visuellen Kontext ihrer Aktivitäten verfügen. Zur Ver-besserung der zeitlichen Koordination schlagen wir eine Augmented Reality -basierte Lösung vor, welche den/die TeampartnerIn mittels...

This editorial introduces the special issue of Interacting with Computer on Heterogeneous Models and Modelling Approaches for Engineering of Interactive Systems. This special issue was proposed to gather the best contributions from a series of workshops organized alongside conferences such as FM’19 (3rd World Congress on Formal Methods) and EICS’19...

This volume constitutes the proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Social Computing, CollabTech 2021, held August/September 2021. Due to VOVID-19 pandemic is was held virtually. The 5 full and 4 work-in-process papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 19 submissions. The p...

One key predictor of team performance and productivity is the teams’ ability to coordinate its subtasks as precisely as possible over time. Thereby, the quality of the temporal coordination in teams is highly dependent on several cognitive team skills, like for instance the ability to build a precise and stable mental model of the situation (shared...

Information access needs to be uncomplicated, as users may not benefit from complex and potentially richer data that may be less easy to obtain. A user’s demand for answering more sophisticated research questions including aggregations could be fulfilled by the usage of SQL. However, this comes with the cost of high complexity, which requires for a...

One major determinant for the performance and productivity of teams is the temporal coordination of interdependent sub-tasks within the teamwork process. The accuracy of the temporal coordination significantly depends on whether the team member share a precise mental model of the teamwork process, which encompasses the current process state and the...

Responsible use of cultural heritage requires networking of different research approaches and documentation techniques from different disciplines, as well as, the appropriate preservation and multi-functional availability of research data. Furthermore, the provision of information and the transfer of knowledge to the public are also indispensable f...

Virtual Reality has been used in (clinical) psychology for decades now, but has seen a high rise in recent years with the increased availability of VR systems. One of the methods adopted to VR is the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST), which is designed to induce psychosocial stress. The currently leading TSST VR tool requires the bundle purchase of a...

Leaning (the upper body) has several times been shown to be a suitable virtual travel technique when being seated; in both, flying as well as ground-based scenarios. The direction of the steering method most commonly used is gaze/head-directed. However, this does not allow to inspect the environment independently from the direction of movement. The...

In virtual reality research, extensive effort has been made towards thoughtfully investigating various locomotion and interaction techniques in order to constitute an immersive experience for the user. Mandated by design, seated applications are obliged to utilize alternate means of locomotion due to the inability to naturally move through the envi...

Die zeitliche Koordination räumlich verteilter Teams gestaltet sich durch die räumliche Trennung häufig suboptimal. Zur Unterstützung solcher Teams wird ein AR-basiertes Assistenzsystem vorgeschlagen, dass durch die Erhöhung der Task State Awareness die zeitliche Koordination verbessert. Der Beitrag zeigt die Ergebnisse der nutzerzentrierten Entwic...

Various evaluation approaches exist for multi-purpose visual analytics (VA) frameworks. They are based on empirical studies in information visualization or on community activities, for example, VA Science and Technology Challenge (2006-2014) created as a community evaluation resource to 'decide upon the right metrics to use, and the appropriate imp...

This paper presents a comprehensive formal engineering approach for the development of gaze guiding as an adaptive computer-based job aid to support semi-automated technical control tasks. Major requirement for this engineering method was to present a model-based approach, which on the one hand offers a coherent integration of various heterogeneous...

Technologies like augmented reality have the potential to support teams in their everyday working environment. In this paper, we present a user centered design approach for defining requirements based on a taxonomy for augmented reality systems. Therefore , we first go into detail of the taxonomy. Afterwards we present requirements engineering base...

Using a collaborative virtual environment (CVE) can reduce the barriers of remote communication, which makes CVEs being increasingly used to support collaborative work between spatially dispersed collaborators. Augmented reality (AR) builds a bridge between working in real and virtual environment, which makes AR a candidate technology to implement...

Embodied conversational agents become more and more important in various virtual reality applications, e.g., as peers, trainers or therapists. Besides their appearance and behavior, appropriate speech is required for them to be perceived as human-like and realistic. Additionally to the used voice signal, also its auralization in the immersive virtu...

Relational data with a spatial embedding and depicted as node-link diagram is very common, e.g, in neuroscience, and edge bundling is one way to increase its readability or reveal hidden structures. This article presents a 3D extension to kernel density estimation-based edge bundling that is meant to be used in an interactive immersive analysis set...

Workshops are a great opportunity for identifying innovative topics of research that might require discussion and maturation. This paper summarizes the outcomes of the workshops track of the 11th Engineering Interactive Computing Systems conference (EICS 2019), held in Valencia (Spain) on 18-21 June 2019. The track featured three workshops, one hal...

In this work we evaluate the impact of passive haptic feedback on touch-based menus, given the constraints and possibilities of a seated, desk-based scenario in VR. Therefore, we compare a menu that once is placed on the surface of a desk and once mid-air on a surface in front of the user. The study design is completed by two conditions without pas...

The ongoing migration of HMDs to the consumer market also allows the integration of immersive environments into analysis workflows that are often bound to an (office) desk. However, a critical factor when considering VR solutions for professional applications is the prevention of cybersickness. In the given scenario the user is usually seated and t...

Figure 1: Experimental setting for the four different conditions, from left to right: Desk without a physical desk but the menu aligned with the virtual desk, DeskPlus with the menu aligned with a physical and virtual desk, Air at a physical desk but the menu aligned to the task and AirPlus at a physical desk, aligned to the task and aligned with a...

In this work, we evaluate the feasibility of an office desk substitution in the context of a visual data analysis task involving travel. We measure the impact on cybersickness as well as the general task performance and presence. In the conducted user study (n = 52), surprisingly, and partially in contradiction to existing work, we found no signifi...

The complexity of nowadays car manufacturing processes increases constantly due to the increasing number of electronic and digital features in cars as well as the shorter life cycle of car designs, which raises the need for faster adaption to new car models. However, the ongoing digitalization of production and working contexts offers the chance to...

Neuronal network models and corresponding computer simulations are invaluable tools to aid the interpretation of the relationship between neuron properties, connectivity and measured activity in cortical tissue. Spatiotemporal patterns of activity propagating across the cortical surface as observed experimentally can for example be described by neu...

We provide one movie demonstrating the interactive usage and multi-view aspect of the tool VIOLA (Video 1) and one movie for each of the four views of VIOLA (Videos 2–5).

In this interactive demo, we present Fluid Sketching as an innovative virtual reality application, which is highly inspired by traditional marbling art. By using a particle-based simulation combined with natural, spatial, and multi-modal interaction techniques, we create and extend the original artwork to build a comprehensive interactive experienc...

In this work we describe a hybrid, hand-based interaction metaphor that makes remote and close objects in an HMD-based immersive virtual environment (IVE) seamlessly accessible. To accomplish this, different existing techniques, such as go-go and HOMER, were combined in a way that aims for generality, intuitiveness, uniformity and speed. A techniqu...

This work presents a prototypic system that uses augmented reality technology to support temporal coordination of spatial dispersed production team members. This system is used to investigate the potential benefit of augmented reality for temporal coordination. We will present a study design as well as various research questions to be considered in...

Simulation models in many scientific fields can have non-unique solutions or unique solutions which can be difficult to find. Moreover, in evolving systems, unique final state solutions can be reached by multiple different trajectories. Neuroscience is no exception. Often, neural network models are subject to parameter fitting to obtain desirable o...