Prasanth Sasikumar

Stress and poor sleep remain pervasive challenges in modern life, yet traditional relaxation practices such as pranayama (breathing exercises) require guidance, discipline, and environments that are often difficult to sustain. VR–based relaxation tools have emerged as alternatives, but their abrupt immersion into fully virtual environments can feel disruptive and misaligned with the gradual nature of meditative practices. To address this gap, we collaborated with pranayama practitioners in a co-design process to develop Zenflow, an MR system that blends subtle visuals and breathing cues to gradually transform the user’s surroundings into a restorative virtual space. We evaluated the system in a 3 week within-subjects study (N=12), comparing traditional Pranayama with two variations of Zenflow. Results show that Zenflow transition design significantly improved self-reported sleep quality and objective measures of stress and sleep. Our work contributes design insights and evidence that gradual environmental transition can improve MR systems for stress management.

People have different temptations and habitual behaviors they wish to change, often imagining a better version of themselves. However, most existing behavior-change interventions rely on conscious self-regulation. Existing tools require users to notice a prompt, interpret it, and deliberately override an impulse, which is cognitively demanding and prone to failure when behavior becomes automatic. In this paper, we explore sensory interruptions as a way to bridge perception, cognition, and behavior. These interruptions aim to momentarily disrupt autopilot behavior and enable users to regain control. We evaluated four sensory interruptions: vibrotactile, heat, cold, and audio, with 11 participants. Our findings reveal clear subjective trade-offs: vibrotactile was often perceived as habituated, while heat was effective but generally disliked due to its punitive feel. Nevertheless, most interruptions produced a brief micro-pause that prompted participants to reconsider their behavior, highlighting the potential of physical modulation as a complementary approach to self-regulation.

Wearable devices increasingly capture physiological signals related to users’ affective and cognitive states, yet these signals are commonly presented through numerical dashboards that are difficult to interpret and act upon in everyday contexts. We present EmoDrink, a Mixed Reality (MR) research framework for communicating physiology-informed wellbeing recommendations through embodied representations. EmoDrink integrates smartwatch-derived signals with brief self-reports and contextual cues to generate a single beverage recommendation, then holds this recommendation constant while varying how it is presented: an abstract visualization, a generic embodied agent, and a personalized “future self” avatar. Through a walk-up-and-use MR experience, attendees can directly compare how embodiment shapes trust, comfort, and interpretability when engaging with identical wellbeing guidance.

People with a fear of being in water rarely engage in water activities and hence miss out on the associated health benefits. Prior research suggested virtual exposure to treat fears. However, when it comes to a fear of being in water, virtual water might not capture water’s immersive qualities, while real water can pose safety risks. We propose extended reality to combine both advantages: We conducted a study (N=12) where participants with a fear of being in water interacted with playful water-inspired virtual reality worlds while floating inside a floatation tank. Our findings, supported quantitatively by heart rate variability and qualitatively by interviews, suggest that playful extended reality could mitigate fear responses in an entertaining way. We also present insights for the design of future systems that aim to help people with a fear of being in water and other phobias by using the best of the virtual and physical worlds.

Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students often encounter challenges in their specialized educational settings, particularly in language literacy development, due to limited exposure to written and spoken language. We, therefore, collaborated with 8 DHH students and 2 Teachers of the Deaf (ToDs) from a School for Deaf in Sri Lanka to explore how to effectively utilize a real-time augmented reality (AR) caption interface in their classroom settings, aiming to enhance their learning experience. We adopted a User-Centered Design (UCD) process to develop and refine the prototype addressing the design challenges affecting the overall learning experience. User study with 12 DHH participants revealed a strong preference (91.66%) for our prototype and highlighted its potential to enhance the learning experiences. Our findings contribute to further exploration of the potential of tailored AR caption interfaces in addressing the educational challenges faced by DHH students and enhancing their learning experience in specialized educational settings.