Maheshya Weerasinghe

Isidro Butaslac, Yota Nagaya, Almira Princess Redoble et al.

In everyday life, physical effort is often minimized and convenience is prioritized, making it difficult for many people to sustain light exercise and stretching despite well-known long-term benefits. This challenge often arises not from objective movement limitations, but from whether an action feels doable in the moment and, therefore worth continuing. This position paper argues that subtle VR hand redirection (HR) can be reframed as a form of cross-sensory support for sustained practice by targeting perceived doability: a moment-to-moment cognitive appraisal that an action is within one's capability while requiring manageable effort. We propose that conservative HR, applied within known perceptual limits, can create repeated micro-success experiences (e.g., reaching a virtual goal earlier with similar physical movement). These micro-successes may increase continuation intention and early re-engagement without relying on overt pressure or intensive coaching. At the same time, such support raises questions about autonomy and authenticity. We therefore articulate two research questions: (RQ1) how HR shifts perceived doability to support sustained practice and positive behavior change; and (RQ2) when HR functions as acceptable support versus becoming counterproductive by undermining authenticity, agency, trust, or fostering dependence. We present an initial sit-and-reach VR prototype, outline a research plan, and identify key design tensions to spark community discussions on autonomy-preserving cross-sensory futures in HCI.

Nuwan T. Attygalle, Matjaž Kljun, Aaron Quigley et al.

The 'keyword method' is an effective technique for learning vocabulary of a foreign language. It involves creating a memorable visual link between what a word means and what its pronunciation in a foreign language sounds like in the learner's native language. However, these memorable visual links remain implicit in the people's mind and are not easy to remember for a large set of words. To enhance the memorisation and recall of the vocabulary, we developed an application that combines the keyword method with text-to-image generators to externalise the memorable visual links into visuals. These visuals represent additional stimuli during the memorisation process. To explore the effectiveness of this approach we first run a pilot study to investigate how difficult it is to externalise the descriptions of mental visualisations of memorable links, by asking participants to write them down. We used these descriptions as prompts for text-to-image generator (DALL-E2) to convert them into images and asked participants to select their favourites. Next, we compared different text-to-image generators (DALL-E2, Midjourney, Stable and Latent Diffusion) to evaluate the perceived quality of the generated images by each. Despite heterogeneous results, participants mostly preferred images generated by DALL-E2, which was used also for the final study. In this study, we investigated whether providing such images enhances the retention of vocabulary being learned, compared to the keyword method only. Our results indicate that people did not encounter difficulties describing their visualisations of memorable links and that providing corresponding images significantly improves memory retention.

Jordan Aiko Deja, Isidro Butaslac, Nicko Reginio Caluya et al.

Robots are moving beyond industrial settings into creative, educational, and public environments where interaction is open-ended and improvisational. Yet much of human-AI-robot interaction remains framed around performance and efficiency, positioning humans as supervisors rather than collaborators. We propose a re-framing of AI interaction with robots as scaffolding: infrastructure that enables humans to shape robotic behaviour over time while remaining meaningfully in control. Through scenarios from creative practice, learning-by-teaching, and embodied interaction, we illustrate how humans can act as executive directors, defining intent and steering revisions, while AI mediates between human expression and robotic execution. We outline design and evaluation implications that foreground creativity, agency, and flow. Finally, we discuss open challenges in social, scalable, and mission-critical contexts. We invite the community to rethink interacting with Robots and AI not as autonomy, but as sustained support for human creativity.