Bachelor/Master Thesis

Start Date: October 2025

Supervisor: Clara Sayffaerth (clara.sayffaerth@um.ifi.lmu.de) and Eleni Stefanidi (eleni.stefanidi@plus.ac.at)

Overview

This project focuses on exploring how virtual agents and avatars can support people in outdoor settings through XR (Extended Reality) technologies. While XR applications like AR and VR have been widely studied in controlled lab environments, there is still limited knowledge about how people interact with virtual agents in the wild, especially in public outdoor contexts like city tours, educational walks, or outdoor navigation. At the same time, there is growing interest in leveraging XR head-mounted displays (HMDs) for real-world guidance and learning. Virtual agents or avatars offer a promising way to deliver instructions, provide information, and support users during their outdoor activities. However, designing and evaluating systems in these realistic, unpredictable environments raises new challenges around usability, social acceptance, and technical robustness. This project aims to address the research gap by designing, deploying, and studying XR-based agent interactions in outdoor public spaces.

Objectives

• Conduct a literature review on virtual agents and avatars in XR, with a focus on outdoor, in-the-wild developments as well as prior work on XR-based tours, instructions, and educational applications
• Design interaction concepts for how the virtual agent communicates and guides users outdoors
• Develop an XR application for HMDs, featuring an interactive virtual agent
• Conduct an in-the-wild user study in a real outdoor environment (e.g., sightseeing tour, city walk, or a similar scenario)
• Analyze the quantitative and qualitative data
• Summarize your findings in a thesis and present them
• (Optional) Co-author a research paper based on your findings

Required Skills & Knowledge

• Strong communication skills in English.
• Experience with XR development preferably AR/HMDs in Unity
• Motivation to learn new skills
• (Nice to have) Experience with creating and animating avatars

Please send a brief motivation letter, CV, and transcript of records if you are interested in this Master thesis.