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Extended Reality (XR) technologies enable the personalized mediation of an individual's perceivable reality across modalities, thereby creating a Personalized Reality (PR). While this may lead to individually beneficial effects in the form of more efficient, more fun, and safer experiences, it may also lead to perceptual filter bubbles since individuals are exposed predominantly or exclusively to content that is congruent with their existing beliefs and opinions. This undermining of a shared basis for interaction and discussion through constrained perceptual worldviews may impact society through increased polarization and other well-documented negative effects of filter bubbles. In this paper, we argue that this issue can be mitigated by increasing individuals' awareness of their current perspective and providing avenues for development, including through support for engineered serendipity and fostering of self-actualization that already show promise for traditional recommender systems. We discuss how these methods may be transferred to XR to yield valuable tools to give people transparency and agency over their perceptual worldviews in a responsible manner.

Jannis Strecker, Luka Bekavac, Kenan Bektaş, and Simon Mayer. 2025. Change Your Perspective, Widen Your Worldview! Societally Beneficial Perceptual Filter Bubbles in Personalized Reality. In Proceedings of Purposeful XR: Affordances, Challenges, and Speculations for an Ethical Future at CHI 2025 (Purposeful XR ’25). 6 pages. https://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/handle/20.500.14171/122376

Inspired by the concepts of diminishing reality and ad-blocking in browsers, this study investigates the perceived benefits and concerns of blocking physical, real-world content, particularly ads, through Extended Reality (XR). To understand how users perceive this concept, we first conducted a user study (N=18) with an ad-blocking prototype to gather initial insights. The results revealed a mixed willingness to adopt XR blockers, with participants appreciating aspects such as customizability, convenience, and privacy. Expected benefits included enhanced focus and reduced stress, while concerns centered on missing important information and increased feelings of isolation. Hence, we investigated the user acceptance of different ad-blocking visualizations through a follow-up online survey (N=120), comparing six concepts based on related work. The results indicated that the XR ad-blocker visualizations play a significant role in how and for what kinds of advertisements such a concept might be used, paving the path for future feedback-driven prototyping.

Christopher Katins, Jannis Strecker, Jan Hinrichs, Pascal Knierim, Bastian Pfleging, and Thomas Kosch. 2025. Ad-Blocked Reality: Evaluating User Perceptions of Content Blocking Concepts Using Extended Reality. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '25), April 26–May 01, 2025, Yokohama, Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 18 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713230

Technological advancements, particularly in artificial intelligence, significantly transform our society and work practices. Computational thinking (CT) has emerged as a crucial 21-century skill, enabling individuals to solve problems more effectively through an automation-oriented perspective and fundamental concepts of computer science. To ensure the effective integration of CT into educational curricula, it is crucial to develop efficient assessment frameworks that allow teachers to measure and promote student CT proficiency. Therefore, our aim is to develop a short test to measure CT among undergraduate students. To this end, we consider two performance tests: the Computational Thinking test (CTt) and the Algorithmic Thinking Test for Adults (ATTA). We use items from both instruments to compile a short test. Based on a sample of 290 second-year non-computer science undergraduate students, we provide evidence on the quality of our test. Besides classical test theory, we apply item response theory, namely Rasch modeling, and confirmatory factor analysis. Our test shows favorable properties, e.g., Cronbach's alpha > .75, and may be suitable for the efficient assessment of CT across higher education programs.

Josef Guggemos, Roman Rietsche, Stephan Aier, Jannis Strecker and Simon Mayer. 2024. Measuring Computational Thinking - Developing A Short Performance Test For Higher Education. In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in Digital Age (CELDA 2024), October 26-28, Zabreg, Croatia.