Proceedings of the 37th Australian Conference on Human-Computer Interaction

Abstract

The Proceedings of the 37th Australian Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (OzCHI '25) collects pivotal research focused on advancing user experience, interface design, and interaction methodologies for emerging technologies. Key themes include the intersection of artificial intelligence and human interaction, designing accessible systems, and exploring immersive environments like augmented and virtual reality. The volume provides crucial insights into user requirements and societal implications that drive the future development of computing hardware and software ecosystems.

Report

OzCHI '25: Proceedings of the 37th Australian Conference on Human-Computer Interaction Analysis

Key Highlights

• Focus on Next-Gen Interaction: The conference emphasizes research into novel modalities, including embodied interaction, multimodal input processing (e.g., speech, gesture, haptics), and interaction design for immersive technologies (AR/VR).
• AI Integration: A significant segment addresses the design and evaluation of user interfaces mediated by generative AI and large language models, focusing on issues of transparency, trust, and control.
• Accessibility and Inclusivity: Research highlights methods and frameworks for building interactive systems that are robustly accessible to diverse user populations, prioritizing inclusive design principles from the ground up.
• Ubiquitous and Edge Computing UX: Papers explore the user experience challenges inherent in computing environments distributed across IoT devices, edge servers, and personal hardware, emphasizing context-aware and low-latency interaction.

Technical Details

While the conference focuses on human factors and design methodologies, the underlying technical discussions typically revolve around the requirements imposed on hardware and system architecture:

• Low-Latency Feedback Loops: Studies on real-time haptics and immersive interfaces implicitly demand extremely low processing latency (often <10ms end-to-end), which necessitates highly efficient instruction sets and optimized peripheral interfaces.
• Power and Thermal Constraints: For ubiquitous HCI applications, such as wearables and mobile AR, research often measures the impact of computation load on device battery life and thermal comfort, setting stringent efficiency requirements for the underlying CPU/GPU/NPU architectures.
• Multimodal Sensor Processing Pipelines: Technical papers detail system architectures for fusing data from multiple sensors (cameras, microphones, bio-sensors) for input, requiring specialized acceleration and high-throughput data movement.
• Methodologies: Research uses mixed methods, including longitudinal field studies, rapid prototyping using common frameworks (e.g., Unity/Unreal), and specialized quantitative metrics (e.g., NASA TLX, SUS) to evaluate system usability.

Implications

• Driving Hardware Requirements: The findings from OzCHI directly influence the specifications needed for future processors. As HCI moves toward richer, real-time, personalized, and privacy-sensitive on-device processing, the demand for highly customized, efficient architectures increases.
• Relevance to RISC-V: RISC-V's defining feature—extensibility—makes it the ideal platform to satisfy the domain-specific architecture (DSA) needs identified by HCI research. Specific findings on necessary performance boosts for AI inference, sensor fusion, or graphic acceleration in HCI tasks can be directly translated into custom RISC-V instruction extensions. This enables hardware developers to optimize chips for the exact human needs studied in the proceedings.
• Ecosystem Development Focus: The conference guides software toolchain and OS development by outlining the challenges associated with memory management, concurrency, and security in complex, distributed interaction systems. This feedback loop ensures that the technology ecosystem evolves to support human-centric computing paradigms efficiently.