Partners from Reichman University present a GuestXR-based paper at the CHI23 conference

CHI23 conference

Iddo Wald and Amber Maimon, project partners from Prof. Amir Amedi’s lab at Reichman University, have presented a scientific paper based on GuestXR research during the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI23), which took place in Hamburg, Germany, on April 23th-28th.

The work, entitled “Breathing based immersive interactions for enhanced agency and body awareness: a claustrophobia motivated study”, investigates the use of “embreathment”, which is the representation of one’s physiological breath, in immersive experiences to enhance embodiment and body awareness.

In particular, embreathment is proposed for reducing claustrophobia and associated negative cognitions such as feelings of restriction, loss of agency, and sense of suffocation, by enhancing agency and interoception in circumstances where one’s ability to act is restricted.

The informed design process of an experience designed for this purpose is presented, alongside an experiment employing the experience, evaluating embodiment, presence, and interoception. The results indicate that embreathment leads to significantly greater levels of embodiment and presence when in XR environments and a trend was observed implying enhanced interoception in the embreathment condition.

Below you can watch a video of the leading researchers presentation of the article:

The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems is the premier international conference on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).

The event brings together researchers and practitioners from all over the world and from diverse cultures, backgrounds, and positionalities, who have as an overarching goal to make the world a better place with interactive digital technologies.