Recent Publications

Recent Publications (See Google Scholar for our latest research)

Selected Conference Publications

Extended Reality and Internet of Things for Hyper-Connected Metaverse Environments

Jie Guan, Jay Irizawa, Alexis Morris


2022 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW)

[DOI] [Project] 

AbstractThe Metaverse encompasses technologies related to the internet, virtual and augmented reality, and other domains toward smart interfaces that are hyper-connected, immersive, and engaging. However, Metaverse applications face inherent disconnects between virtual and physical components and interfaces. This work explores how an Extended Metaverse framework can be used to increase the seamless integration of interoperable agents between virtual and physical environments. It contributes an early theory and practice toward the synthesis of virtual and physical smart environments anticipating future designs and their potential for connected experiences.
Bibtex@INPROCEEDINGS{9757381,  author={Guan, Jie and Irizawa, Jay and Morris, Alexis},  booktitle={2022 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW)},   title={Extended Reality and Internet of Things for Hyper-Connected Metaverse Environments},   year={2022},  volume={},  number={},  pages={163-168},  doi={10.1109/VRW55335.2022.00043}}

AbstractThe internet-of-things (IoT) refers to the growing number of embedded interconnected devices within everyday ubiquitous objects and environments, especially their networks, edge controllers, data gathering and management, sharing, and contextual analysis capabilities. However, the IoT suffers from inherent limitations in terms of human-computer interaction. In this landscape, there is a need for interfaces that have the potential to translate the IoT more solidly into the foreground of everyday smart environments, where its users are multimodal, multifaceted, and where new forms of presentation, adaptation, and immersion are essential. This work highlights the synergetic opportunities for both IoT and XR to converge toward hybrid XR objects with strong real-world connectivity, and IoT objects with rich XR interfaces. The paper contributes i) an understanding of this multi-disciplinary domain XR-IoT (XRI); ii) a theoretical perspective on how to design XRI agents based on the literature; iii) a system design architectural framework for XRI smart environment development; and iv) an early discussion of this process. It is hoped that this research enables future researchers in both communities to better understand and deploy hybrid smart XRI environments. 
Bibtex

@inproceedings{morris2021xri,

  title={An xri mixed-reality internet-of-things architectural framework toward immersive and adaptive smart environments},

  author={Morris, Alexis and Guan, Jie and Azhar, Amna},

  booktitle={2021 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality Adjunct (ISMAR-Adjunct)},

  pages={68--74},

  year={2021},

  organization={IEEE}

}




A Hybrid Quality-of-Experience Taxonomy for Mixed Reality IoT (XRI) Systems

Tara Tsan, Alexis Morris

2021 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC) 

[DOI] [Project] 

AbstractMixed Reality (XR) and the Internet-of-Things (IoT) are two rapidly advancing paradigms, gaining maturity toward the near term, in both industry, government and other organizations, and consumer scenarios. These domains are converging simultaneously, leading to XR systems with IoT embedded capabilities in smart environments, and IoT systems with more immersive, engaging, and adaptive interfaces and use cases. Synergies between these system design platforms are currently being explored, although there remains the need for a clear treatment of the human-factor and quality of experience perspectives of these hybrid XR and IoT (XRI) systems. This work contributes a new taxonomy derived from synthesis of usability literature and other design considerations within these disciplines toward a framework for XRI system design, development, and evaluation. It is hoped that this enables future researchers and developers of XRI systems to create more impactful, functional, and usable XRI across multiple domains in the near future. 
Bibtex@inproceedings{tsang2021hybrid,  title={A hybrid quality-of-experience taxonomy for mixed reality iot (xri) systems},  author={Tsang, Tara and Morris, Alexis},  booktitle={2021 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC)},  pages={1809--1816},  year={2021},  organization={IEEE}

}



AbstractThe internet-of-things (IoT) refers to the growing field of interconnected pervasive computing devices and the networking that supports smart, embedded applications. The IoT has multiple human-computer interaction challenges due to its many formats and interlinked components, and central to these is the need to provide sensory information and situational context pertaining to users in a more human-friendly, easily understandable format. This work addresses this by applying mixed reality toward expressing the underlying behaviors and states internal to IoT devices and IoT-enabled objects. It extends the authors' previous research on IoT Avatars (mixed reality character representations of physical IoT devices), presenting a new head-mounted display framework and interconnection architecture. This contributes i) an exploration of mixed reality for smart spaces, ii) an approach toward expressive avatar behaviors using fuzzy inference, and iii) an early functional prototype of a hybrid physical and mixed reality IoT-enabled object. This approach is a step toward new information presentation, interaction, and engagement capabilities for smart devices and environments. 
Bibtex@inproceedings{morris2020toward,  title={Toward mixed reality hybrid objects with iot avatar agents},  author={Morris, Alexis and Guan, Jie and Lessio, Nadine and Shao, Yiyi},  booktitle={2020 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC)},  pages={766--773},  year={2020},  organization={IEEE}}
AbstractConversational agents (CAs), often referred to as chatbots, are being widely deployed within existing commercial frameworks and online service websites. As society moves further into incorporating data rich systems, like the internet of things (IoT), into daily life, it is expected that conversational agents will take on an increasingly important role to help users manage these complex systems. In this, the concept of personality is becoming increasingly important, as we seek for more human-friendly ways to interact with these CAs. In this work a conceptual framework is proposed that considers how existing standard psychological and persona models could be mapped to different kinds of CA functionality outside of strictly dialogue. As CAs become more diverse in their abilities, and more integrated with different kinds of systems, it is important to consider how function can be impacted by the design of agent personality, whether intentionally designed or not. Based on this framework, derived archetype classes of CAs are presented as starting points that can hopefully aid designers, developers, and the curious, into thinking about how to work toward better CA personality development. 

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