Woontack Woo

An XR-Twin-based space-telling authoring tool and platform supporting art-museum exhibition planning.

Development of Open XR platform for high immersive collaboration

Real-time XR interface technology for environmental adaption through next-generation virtual objects.

Development of Technology to Reenact Industrial Spatial Knowledge from Incomplete Data

Asynchronous communication is essential in diverse contexts such as remote meetings, education, and collaboration. However, traditional replay-based systems lack interactivity and often fail to preserve critical contextual cues. This paper introduces Avagent, a novel framework for asynchronous com munication in Virtual/Augmented Reality (VR/AR) environments that leverages agentized avatars to bridge temporal and contextual gaps between participants. Unlike typical agent-mediated systems, the framework utilizes users’ data to create Avagents that reflect their actual intent, emotional states, and behaviors. By accurately capturing and replicating both verbal and nonverbal behaviors, Avagents enable more interactive and context-rich communication. This approach facilitates dynamic interactions, enhances social presence, and ensures continuity across timelines. Avagents empower new users to engage interactively with prior discussions, fostering deeper understanding and seamless collaboration with previous users. Envisioning the benefits of Avagents as an engaging and context-rich solution for asynchronous communication, this paper outlines interaction scenarios, a work-in-progress prototype, and associated challenges.

Immersive technologies such as virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) allow remote users to meet and interact in a shared virtual space using embodied virtual avatars, creating a sense of co-presence. However, asynchronous communication-essential in many real-world contexts-remains underexplored in these environments. Traditional playback-based systems lack interactivity and often fail to preserve critical contextual cues necessary for effective asynchronous communication. In this paper, we introduce AVAGENTs, AI-powered virtual avatars that replicate users' verbal and nonverbal cues from recordings of past meetings. Avagents can interpret meeting context and generate appropriate responses to questions posed by asynchronous viewers. Through a user study (N = 30), we evaluated Avagents against a traditional playback method and a voice-based AI assistant across two asynchronous meeting scenarios: analytic reasoning and affective resonance. Results showed that Avagents enhance the asynchronous communication experience by increasing social presence, sense of belonging, emotional intimacy, and other user perceptions. We discuss the findings and their implications for designing effective AI-driven asynchronous communication tools in VR/AR environments.

As immersive virtual environments become more prevalent, avatars serve as critical social interfaces. This study explores how combinations of visual appearance, vocal characteristics, and informed identity influence users' initial impressions and partner preferences in four distinct XR scenarios: physical, intellectual, social, and romantic. A within-subject experiment with 40 participants assessed perceived warmth, competence, uncanniness, and selection preferences across diverse avatar configurations. Results indicate that vocal cues had a particularly strong impact on social perception, often shaping feelings of approachability and clarity in communication. While some cue alignments enhanced perceived social comfort and engagement, inconsistencies across gender-related cues occasionally led to increased perceptions of uncanniness, especially in emotionally sensitive contexts. These findings highlight the importance of designing avatars that thoughtfully adapt to different interaction contexts, supporting inclusive and responsive user experiences in social XR platforms.

This paper proposes a mutual space representation to support remote collaboration in Mixed and Augmented Reality (MAR) environments. To achieve high immersion and coexistence in MAR remote collaboration, a mutual space based on heterogeneous physical spaces that can be commonly utilized by collaborating participants is required. Although previous studies have proposed various spatial matching and modifying methods to overcome spatial heterogeneity, their different representations have made their integrated use in real-world scenarios difficult. To overcome these limitations, this paper proposes a mutual space representation standard that includes the representation of physical space, matching space, and collaboration context required for mutual space generation and management. We expect that the proposed standards will serve as a foundation for seamlessly applying solutions accumulated in academia to industrial systems, thereby providing users with a more immersive and coexistent MAR remote collaboration experience.