Tiffany D. Do

Omar A. Khan, Bao Han Trinh, Lee Lisle et al.

Embodying non-human body parts in VR is a prevalent practice among certain subcultures and is a personally important creative outlet to many individuals. However, the discrepant morphology between real and virtual bodies can decrease Sense of Embodiment (SoE). Haptic feedback can compensate by increasing SoE felt towards non-human body parts, but there is a literature gap in comparing the effects of different haptic modalities, and their combinations, on SoE. Through an online survey sent out to social VR communities (n = 63), we determined that animal ears are a commonly embodied and ecologically valid non-human body part to study. We then ran a 2x2 within-subjects user study (n = 28) with two independent variables: active haptics, delivered through vibrotactile gloves, and passive haptics, delivered through a physical headband, for when participants reach up to touch virtual dog ears appended to their avatar in VR. Our findings show that (1) passive haptics produced the strongest overall embodiment outcomes, (2) combining modalities reduced the benefits of passive haptics, and (3) SoE towards non-human body parts positively correlates with SoE towards the entire avatar. We discuss implications of our findings in various domains, and on embodiment literature.

Arijit Chakma, Peng He, Honglu Liu et al.

Developing expertise in diagnostic reasoning requires practice with diverse student artifacts, yet privacy regulations prohibit sharing authentic student work for teacher professional development (PD) at scale. We present DrawSim-PD, the first generative framework that simulates NGSS-aligned, student-like science drawings exhibiting controllable pedagogical imperfections to support teacher training. Central to our approach are apability profiles--structured cognitive states encoding what students at each performance level can and cannot yet demonstrate. These profiles ensure cross-modal coherence across generated outputs: (i) a student-like drawing, (ii) a first-person reasoning narrative, and (iii) a teacher-facing diagnostic concept map. Using 100 curated NGSS topics spanning K-12, we construct a corpus of 10,000 systematically structured artifacts. Through an expert-based feasibility evaluation, K--12 science educators verified the artifacts' alignment with NGSS expectations (>84% positive on core items) and utility for interpreting student thinking, while identifying refinement opportunities for grade-band extremes. We release this open infrastructure to overcome data scarcity barriers in visual assessment research.