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Fannie Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Fannie Liu.

14 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

The Missing Link of XR: Empathy-Driven Reality for XR and Beyond

Extended reality (XR) for socialising is becoming increasingly popular. However, unlike conventional social platforms, XR prioritises embodiment and immersion, factors that strongly impact one's physical and mental states. We envision a future for XR where all users, regardless of abilities and backgrounds, can understand one another, participate, and find safe socialisation spaces. An Empathy-Driven Reality (EDR) is a space where understanding each other's emotional, physical, and cognitive states takes centre stage. It has the potential to enhance empathy beyond how we normally perceive it. To explore this concept, we conducted a hybrid-style workshop over two months with 27 industry and academic researchers in XR, emotion, physiology, assistive technology, and social science. This paper reports on the findings and aims to establish a structure and reference for the 1) design guidelines, 2) research challenges, and 3) potential applications for the future of XR as an EDR. We frame EDR as a conceptual design framework rather than a validated system: a structured design space that links requirements to design mechanisms, together with a research agenda for empathy-centred XR.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2025

TapNav: Adaptive Spatiotactile Screen Readers for Tactually Guided Touchscreen Interactions for Blind and Low Vision People

Screen readers are audio-based software that Blind and Low Vision (BLV) people use to interact with computing devices, such as tablets and smartphones. Although this technology has significantly improved the accessibility of touchscreen devices, the sequential nature of audio limits the bandwidth of information users can receive and process. We introduce TapNav, an adaptive spatiotactile screen reader prototype developed to interact with touchscreen interfaces spatially. TapNav's screen reader provides adaptive auditory feedback that, in combination with a tactile overlay, conveys spatial information and location of interface elements on-screen. We evaluated TapNav with 12 BLV users who interacted with TapNav to explore a data visualization and interact with a bank transactions application. Our qualitative findings show that touch points and spatially constrained navigation helped users anticipate outcomes for faster exploration, and offload cognitive load to touch. We provide design guidelines for creating tactile overlays for adaptive spatiotactile screen readers and discuss their generalizability beyond our exploratory data analysis and everyday application navigation scenarios.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2025

Social Media Should Feel Like Minecraft, Not Instagram: Youth Visions for Meaningful Social Connections through Fictional Inquiry

We conducted co-design workshops with 23 participants (ages 15--24) to explore how youth envision ideal remote social connection. Using Fictional Inquiry (FI) within a Harry Potter-inspired narrative, we found that youth perceive a disconnect between platforms labeled ``social media'' (like Instagram) and those where they actually experience meaningful connections (like Minecraft or Discord). Participants envisioned an immersive platform prioritizing meaningful social connection through presence and immersion, natural self-expression, intuitive spatial navigation leveraging physical-world norms, and playful, low-stakes opportunities for friendship development. We synthesize these visions into six themes articulating relational needs that current platforms systematically marginalize. The FI method proved effective in generating innovative ideas while empowering youth by fostering hope and agency over social media's future. Our findings challenge ``doom'' narratives by reframing social media's harms as outcomes of specific design choices, demonstrating how design research can reopen space for imagining more supportive forms of mediated connection.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2024

Understanding Young People's Creative Goals with Augmented Reality

Young people are major consumers of Augmented Reality (AR) tools like Pok\'emon GO, but they rarely engage in creating these experiences. Creating with technology gives young people a platform for expressing themselves and making social connections. However, we do not know what young people want to create with AR, as existing AR authoring tools are largely designed for adults. To investigate the requirements for an AR authoring tool, we ran eight design workshops with 17 young people in Argentina and the United States that centered on young people's perspectives and experiences. We identified four ways in which young people want to create with} AR, and contribute the following design implications for designers of AR authoring tools for young people: (1) Blending imagination into AR scenarios to preserve narratives, (2) Making traces of actions visible to foster social presence, (3) Exploring how AR artifacts can serve as invitations to connect with others, and (4) Leveraging information asymmetry to encourage learning about the physical world.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2024

Envisioning New Futures of Positive Social Technology: Beyond Paradigms of Fixing, Protecting, and Preventing

Social technology research today largely focuses on mitigating the negative impacts of technology and, therefore, often misses the potential of technology to enhance human connections and well-being. However, we see a potential to shift towards a holistic view of social technology's impact on human flourishing. We introduce Positive Social Technology (Positech), a framework that shifts emphasis toward leveraging social technologies to support and augment human flourishing. This workshop is organized around three themes relevant to Positech: 1) "Exploring Relevant and Adjacent Research" to define and widen the Positech scope with insights from related fields, 2) "Projecting the Landscape of Positech" for participants to outline the domain's key aspects and 3) "Envisioning the Future of Positech," anchored around strategic planning towards a sustainable research community. Ultimately, this workshop will serve as a platform to shift the narrative of social technology research towards a more positive, human-centric approach. It will foster research that goes beyond fixing technologies to protect humans from harm, to also pursue enriching human experiences and connections through technology.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2024

With or Without Permission: Site-Specific Augmented Reality for Social Justice

Movements for social change are often tied to a particular locale. This makes Augmented Reality (AR), which changes how people perceive their surroundings, a promising technology for social justice. Site-specific AR empowers activists to re-tell the story of a place, with or without permission of its owner. It has been used, for example, to reveal hidden histories, re-imagine problematic monuments, and celebrate minority cultures. However, challenges remain concerning technological ownership and accessibility, scalability, sustainability, and navigating collaborations with marginalized communities and across disciplinary boundaries. This half-day workshop at CHI 2024 seeks to bring together an interdisciplinary group of activists, computer scientists, designers, media scholars, and more to identify opportunities and challenges across domains. To anchor the discussion, participants will each share one example of an artifact used in speculating, designing, and/or delivering site-specific AR experiences. This collection of artifacts will inaugurate an interactive database that can inspire a new wave of activists to leverage AR for social justice.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2023

Towards Inclusive Avatars: Disability Representation in Avatar Platforms

Digital avatars are an important part of identity representation, but there is little work on understanding how to represent disability. We interviewed 18 people with disabilities and related identities about their experiences and preferences in representing their identities with avatars. Participants generally preferred to represent their disability identity if the context felt safe and platforms supported their expression, as it was important for feeling authentically represented. They also utilized avatars in strategic ways: as a means to signal and disclose current abilities, access needs, and to raise awareness. Some participants even found avatars to be a more accessible way to communicate than alternatives. We discuss how avatars can support disability identity representation because of their easily customizable format that is not strictly tied to reality. We conclude with design recommendations for creating platforms that better support people in representing their disability and other minoritized identities.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2022

Exploring Immersive Interpersonal Communication via AR

A central challenge of social computing research is to enable people to communicate expressively with each other remotely. Augmented reality has great promise for expressive communication since it enables communication beyond texts and photos and towards immersive experiences rendered in recipients' physical environments. Little research, however, has explored AR's potential for everyday interpersonal communication. In this work, we prototype an AR messaging system, ARwand, to understand people's behaviors and perceptions around communicating with friends via AR messaging. We present our findings under four themes observed from a user study with 24 participants, including the types of immersive messages people choose to send to each other, which factors contribute to a sense of immersiveness, and what concerns arise over this new form of messaging. We discuss important implications of our findings on the design of future immersive communication systems.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2022

Auggie: Encouraging Effortful Communication through Handcrafted Digital Experiences

Digital communication is often brisk and automated. From auto-completed messages to "likes," research has shown that such lightweight interactions can affect perceptions of authenticity and closeness. On the other hand, effort in relationships can forge emotional bonds by conveying a sense of caring and is essential in building and maintaining relationships. To explore effortful communication, we designed and evaluated Auggie, an iOS app that encourages partners to create digitally handcrafted Augmented Reality (AR) experiences for each other. Auggie is centered around crafting a 3D character with photos, animated movements, drawings, and audio for someone else. We conducted a two-week-long field study with 30 participants (15 pairs), who used Auggie with their partners remotely. Our qualitative findings show that Auggie participants engaged in meaningful effort through the handcrafting process, and felt closer to their partners, although the tool may not be appropriate in all situations. We discuss design implications and future directions for systems that encourage effortful communication.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2022

Understanding AR Activism: An Interview Study with Creators of Augmented Reality Experiences for Social Change

The rise of consumer augmented reality (AR) technology has opened up new possibilities for interventions intended to disrupt and subvert cultural conventions. From defacing corporate logos to erecting geofenced digital monuments, more and more people are creating AR experiences for social causes. We sought to understand this new form of activism, including why people use AR for these purposes, opportunities and challenges in using it, and how well it can support activist goals. We conducted semi-structured interviews with twenty people involved in projects that used AR for a social cause across six different countries. We found that AR can overcome physical world limitations of activism to convey immersive, multilayered narratives that aim to reveal invisible histories and perspectives. At the same time, people experienced challenges in creating, maintaining, and distributing their AR experiences to audiences. We discuss open questions and opportunities for creating AR tools and experiences for social change.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2022

Fast Parallel Hypertree Decompositions in Logarithmic Recursion Depth

Modern trends in data collection are bringing current mainstream techniques for database query processing to their limits. Consequently, various novel approaches for efficient query processing are being actively studied. One such approach is based on hypertree decompositions (HDs), which have been shown to carry great potential to process complex queries more efficiently and with stronger theoretical guarantees. However, using HDs for query execution relies on the difficult task of computing decompositions of the query structure, which guides the efficient execution of the query. From theoretical results we know that the performance of purely sequential methods is inherently limited, yet the problem is susceptible to parallelisation. In this paper we propose the first algorithm for computing hypertree decompositions that is well-suited for parallelisation. The proposed algorithm log-k-decomp requires only a logarithmic number of recursion levels and additionally allows for highly parallelised pruning of the search space by restriction to balanced separators. We provide detailed experimental evaluation over the HyperBench benchmark and demonstrate that our approach is highly effective especially for complex queries.

cs.DB↗
arXiv2021

Significant Otter: Understanding the Role of Biosignals in Communication

With the growing ubiquity of wearable devices, sensed physiological responses provide new means to connect with others. While recent research demonstrates the expressive potential for biosignals, the value of sharing these personal data remains unclear. To understand their role in communication, we created Significant Otter, an Apple Watch/iPhone app that enables romantic partners to share and respond to each other's biosignals in the form of animated otter avatars. In a one-month study with 20 couples, participants used Significant Otter with biosignals sensing OFF and ON. We found that while sensing OFF enabled couples to keep in touch, sensing ON enabled easier and more authentic communication that fostered social connection. However, the addition of biosignals introduced concerns about autonomy and agency over the messages they sent. We discuss design implications and future directions for communication systems that recommend messages based on biosignals.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2019

Animo: Sharing Biosignals on a Smartwatch for Lightweight Social Connection

We present Animo, a smartwatch app that enables people to share and view each other's biosignals. We designed and engineered Animo to explore new ground for smartwatch-based biosignals social computing systems: identifying opportunities where these systems can support lightweight and mood-centric interactions. In our work we develop, explore, and evaluate several innovative features designed for dyadic communication of heart rate. We discuss the results of a two-week study (N=34), including new communication patterns participants engaged in, and outline the design landscape for communicating with biosignals on smartwatches.

cs.HC↗