Our paper “Because we are human, we use hands”: Understanding People’s Expectations and Mental Models of Virtual Object Interaction in AR Headsets was accepted for CHI 2025 as Late Breaking Work! We conducted an unconstrained AR headset elicitation study with 30 adults. We examined the participants’ expectations and mental models and found that participants based their interactions on pop-culture, real-world experiences, and expected an immersive physically-engaging environment that follows the laws of physics. Our work contributes a deeper understanding of people’s perceptions and expectations of interacting with AR headsets. We provide recommendations for designing future AR headset experiences. For example, we recommend using analogies to inform users about how to interact with virtual objects in AR headsets.

Alejandro and Mehedi will travel to Japan in April 2025 to present our work!

Check out the paper here!