Everyday Proxy Objects for Virtual Reality

Immersive virtual experiences are becoming ubiquitous in our daily lives. Besides visual and auditory feedback, other senses like haptics, smell and taste can enhance immersion in virtual environments. Most solutions presented in the past require specialized hardware to provide appropriate feedback. To mitigate this need, researchers conceptualized approaches leveraging everyday physical objects as proxies instead. Transferring these approaches to varying physical environments and conditions, however, poses significant challenges to a variety of disciplines such as HCI, VR, haptics, tracking, perceptual science, design, etc. This workshop will explore the integration of everyday items for multi-sensory feedback in virtual experiences and sets course for respective future research endeavors. Since the community still seems to lack a cohesive agenda for advancing this domain, the goal of this workshop is to bring together individuals interested in everyday proxy objects to review past work, build a unifying research agenda, share ongoing work, and encourage collaboration.