Maxi Heitmayer

Open-ear headphones leave the ear canal unobstructed while users engage with personal audio. This combination of personal and environmental sound raises human factors questions about situational awareness, multitasking, and social interaction that have not been investigated in everyday use. Sixteen participants wore open-ear headphones and captured first-person video of their daily activities over 2 weeks, then reviewed the footage with researchers in replay interviews. Reflexive thematic analysis identified four themes: awareness and safety across domestic and mobile contexts; ambient curation in which participants deliberately layered personal audio over environmental sound; privacy and presence , in which the form factor altered both signaling and content sensitivity; and embodied experience , highlighting constraints around hair, piercings, and posture. The findings point to design opportunities for user safety, signaling availability, and accommodating diverse bodies, and suggest further research into the potential for the form factor to support cognition and social activity in hybrid spaces.

Extended reality holds the potential to alter human experiences. This project explores user perceptions of peak experience (PE), a state of self-actualization and fulfillment, within augmented spaces and the potential role it can play for designers and developers to effectively engage immersive World Wide Web (Web3) communities. Semi-structured interviews, including an interactive experience stimulus, with key stakeholders in the Web3 space (staff from global immersive technology entities, brand collaborators, and community members, n = 15) were conducted. The findings reveal rich opportunities for users to experience surprise, delight, and a sense of connection and belonging in these spaces. They further suggest the potential to reshape and extend current user experiences by moving the focus of design toward crafting PEs. This holds great value for users to achieve a fuller sense of self-actualization and for content creators to connect to their communities in more meaningful ways.

The smartphone helps workers balance the demands of their professional and personal lives but can also be a distraction, affecting productivity, wellbeing, and work-life balance. Drawing from insights on the impact of physical environments on object engagement, this study examines how the distance between the smartphone and the user influences interactions in work contexts. Participants (N = 22) engaged in two 5h knowledge work sessions on the computer, with the smartphone placed outside their immediate reach during one session. Results show that limited smartphone accessibility led to reduced smartphone use, but participants shifted non-work activities to the computer and the time they spent on work and leisure activities overall remained unchanged. These findings suggest that discussions on smartphone disruptiveness in work contexts should consider the specific activities performed, challenging narratives of ‘smartphone addiction’ and ‘smartphone overuse’ as the cause of increased disruptions and lowered work productivity.

Since the advent of social media, capturing and holding the attention of people has become paramount for the success of products, political messages and even research. The economics of attention is often seen as part of the market economy. We argue that a larger societal transformation is underway, which will see attention become the defining currency that moves individuals, exchanges, and many other elements of society. This paper connects the attention economy to the institutional foundations of modernity. It then discusses how attention can be accumulated and exchanged like a currency and proposes a dual-stream model distinguishing between calcified and flow attention. Based on this model, we investigate recent developments facilitating the use of attention as a currency, and their potential impact on our daily lives more generally. We conclude by providing an outlook and concrete questions for future research to understand where the economics of attention economy is heading.

This literature review presents a comprehensive and systematic account of research on the experiences of children with extended reality (XR), including VR, AR, and other types of immersive technologies that enhance and augment children’s activities. The search on Scopus and Web of Science produced 531 outputs. Content analysis with inter-rater reliability (Krippendorff’s α) and Leximancer, a software for text mining, were used for analyzing the material. Four research strands were identified: (1) interventions, treatments, and medical procedures in clinical contexts; (2) teaching and learning enhanced by XR; (3) children’s adoption and user experiences; (4) design and prototyping of XR hardware and software for children. The results showed the following findings: (a) studies on children’s clinical interventions and treatments using HMD-supported immersive virtual reality comprise the most substantial strand of studies; (b) research in this area, and in teaching and learning studies, has grown dramatically since 2017, while the other areas have been stagnant over the years; (c) AR research is still limited and is mainly applied in educational contexts for design and prototyping; (d) few studies have considered children’s perspectives on XR safety issues; (e) research on the use of XR for enhancing social and emotional skills development is underrepresented. Future research should focus on the potential of XR technologies for interventions to enhance children’s psychosocial wellbeing and health more broadly. The further implications and study limitations for the fast-developing nature of this transdisciplinary research field are also discussed.