publications

2025

1. Seeing is Not Thinking: Testing Capabilities of VR to Promote Perspective-Taking (Best Paper)

   Eugene Kukshinov, Federica Gini, Anchit Mishra, and 3 more authors

   IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2025

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   Virtual Reality (VR) technologies offer compelling experiences by allowing users to immerse themselves in simulated environments interacting through avatars. However, despite its ability to evoke emotional responses, and seeing ‘through the eyes’ of the displayed other, it remains unclear to what extent VR actually fosters perspective-taking (PT) or thinking about others’ thoughts and feelings. It might be that the common belief that one can “become someone else” through VR is misleading, and that engaging situations through a different viewpoint does not produce a different cognitive standpoint. To test this, we conducted a 2 (perspective, first-person or third-person) by 2 (perspective-taking task or no task) to examine effects on perspective taking, measured via audio-recordings afforded by the think-aloud protocol. Our data demonstrate that while first-person perspective (1PP) facilitates perceived embodiment, it has no appreciable influence on perspective-taking. Regardless of 1PP or third-person perspective (3PP), perspective-taking was substantially and significantly increased when users were given a specific task prompting them to actively consider a character’s perspective. Without such tasks, it seems that participants default to their own viewpoints. These data highlight the need for intentional design in VR experiences to consider content rather than simply viewpoint as key to authentic perspective-taking. To truly harness VR’s potential as an “empathy machine,” developers must integrate targeted perspective-taking tasks or story prompts, ensuring that cognitive engagement is an active component of the experience.

2. TacTalk: Personalizing Haptics Through Conversation

   Anchit Mishra, and Oliver Schneider

   In Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Conversational User Interfaces, 2025

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   Haptic experiences are highly personal, but despite prior work exploring interfaces enabling personalization, we don’t know what process drives the personalization of haptics. To enable a study of this process, including users’ mental models and vocabularies, we introduce TacTalk, a conversational system enabling real time tuning of virtual haptic experiences. We present an application using TacTalk in a popular racing video game, Forza Horizon 5. Through an empirical study, we find that tracking user preference profiles may improve TacTalk’s ability to cater to individual differences, and that TacTalk is more usable than an existing slider-based personalization tool. A thematic analysis of participant interviews reveals an archetypal process of conversational personalization - starting with real-world experiences and domain-specific metaphors, then subsequently inspecting specific aspects of the experience including in-game events and the game controller.

2024

1. Haptic Playground: Empowering Inclusive Haptic Design for Everyone

   Bibhushan Raj Joshi, Sandeep Zechariah George Kollannur, Anchit Mishra, and 2 more authors

   In Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2024

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   While haptic technology is rapidly maturing, training for haptics is in its infancy. Disciplinary siloing has contributed to fast but fragmented growth of the haptics industry; graduate courses mainly exist for individual STEM fields, such as device development for mechanical engineers or study design for psychologists. Despite increasing broad interest to use haptics, many potential researchers and practitioners face barriers to learning how to design and study haptics, especially when their background is outside of STEM fields. This one-day workshop will bring together both expert and new or aspiring hapticians to work together to break down disciplinary silos. Expert hapticians with expertise in design justice and haptics community development will give invited talks to frame the discussion. Attendees will work with two interactive tangible tools to design haptic sensations, then reflect on their process, challenges faced, and successful strategies. By adhering to the principles of inclusive design during the process, we aim to render haptic design accessible to a wider audience, recognizing and respecting the unique design needs of each individual. The result will be a more comprehensive understanding of tangible tools’ crucial role in the haptic technology design process, while offering vital insights on inclusive design, ultimately supporting further development of a multidisciplinary, diverse practice of haptic design and research.

2023

1. Measuring Incompatibility and Clustering Quantum Observables with a Quantum Switch

   Ning Gao, Dantong Li, Anchit Mishra, and 3 more authors

   Phys. Rev. Lett., Apr 2023

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   The existence of incompatible observables is a cornerstone of quantum mechanics and a valuable resource in quantum technologies. Here we introduce a measure of incompatibility, called the mutual eigenspace disturbance (MED), which quantifies the amount of disturbance induced by the measurement of a sharp observable on the eigenspaces of another. The MED provides a metric on the space of von Neumann measurements, and can be efficiently estimated by letting the measurement processes act in an indefinite order, using a setup known as the quantum switch, which also allows one to quantify the noncommutativity of arbitrary quantum processes. Thanks to these features, the MED can be used in quantum machine learning tasks. We demonstrate this application by providing an unsupervised algorithm that clusters unknown von Neumann measurements. Our algorithm is robust to noise and can be used to identify groups of observers that share approximately the same measurement context.