Best Demo Award at CHIWORK 2025

The People’s Choice Best Demo Award at the 4th Annual Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction for Work (CHIWORK 2025) went to the demonstration titled “Dark Haptics Scenarios for Future XR Advertising.”

Publication date
8 Jul 2025
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This research explores the potential for "Dark Haptics" in Extended Reality (XR) advertising, focusing on how haptic feedback can be used to subtly manipulate users' actions and behaviors within immersive environments. Dark haptics refers to the deceptive use of haptic technology, specifically touch-based feedback like vibrations, to manipulate user behavior in digital interfaces. The research is carried out by Karthikeya Venkatraj (ex-CWI / TU Delft) and Abdallah El Ali (CWI / Utrecht University researcher) - part of CWI's Distributed and Interactive Systems (DIS) group - along with TU Delft researchers Gijs Huisman and Christine Schneegass, they won the People’s Choice Best Demo Award at the 4th Annual Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction for Work (CHIWORK 2025).

Peoples Choice Award best demo

The demonstration showcased two haptic and one pseudo-haptic interactions as a XR-based advertising strategy that can subtly manipulate user actions in this dark future of advertising work. Developed in Unreal Engine 5.5 for the Meta Quest 3, this single-user Virtual Reality experience presents an initial exploration of the manipulative qualities of haptics design that can be exploited within immersive environments. By highlighting these dark design patterns, the demonstration aims to raise awareness and initiate discussion around the ethical implications of haptic feedback for the future of work in immersive environments, particularly within advertising. This work lays the groundwork for future research and development of tools to mitigate the potential harms and risks of dark haptics as immersive technologies become more integrated into professional and commercial environments.

DIS 5
Demostrating Dark Haptics Scenarios for Future XR Advertising

About DIS

CWI's Distributed and Interactive Systems (DIS) group focuses on facilitating and improving the way people use interactive systems and how people communicate with each other. We combine data science with a strong human-centric, empirical approach to understand the experience of users. This enables us to design and develop next generation intelligent and empathic systems. We base our results on realistic testing grounds and data sets, and embrace areas such as ubiquitous computing, human-centered multimedia systems, and languages. Group leader Pablo Cesar won the Dutch prize for ICT research in 2020 and is also a professor of Human-Centered Multimedia at TU Delft.

More information

More information about the winning demonstration: Karthikeya Puttur Venkatraj, Christina Schneegass, Gijs Huisman, and Abdallah El Ali. 2025. Demonstrating Dark Haptics Scenarios for Future XR Advertising. In Adjunct Proceedings of the 4th Annual Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction for Work (CHIWORK '25 Adjunct). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 20, 1–3.