The transport sector is changing significantly as cities grow and technology reshapes travel preferences. Inadequate public transport and rising car ownership present growing challenges, particularly in rural and suburban areas. On-demand public transport offers a promising solution by integrating the latest technologies and user-centric design to deliver flexible, adaptable services that meet diverse and evolving user needs. However, trust and reliability, digital exclusion, car dependency, and limited service availability must be addressed to ensure inclusive, sustainable mobility systems.

This report focuses on X-linjen, an on-demand public transport service operational in Säffle since 2022, studied as part of a project led by KTH Royal Institute of Technology in collaboration with RISE, Nobina, and Värmlandstrafik. The project applies participatory design methods, informed by social practice theories, to engage both users and service providers. The goal is to identify user needs, develop inclusive solutions, and encourage sustainable travel habits, ultimately contributing to societal development. Key findings highlight the need for improvements to app usability, clearer communication about virtual bus stops, and optimized schedules to better serve seniors and other user groups. Integration with existing public transport networks and targeted outreach campaigns are essential for expanding adoption and building trust, particularly among non-users.

Insights from Scandinavian peers—Plustur in Denmark, Kutsuplus in Finland, and Ruter in Norway—offer valuable lessons on balancing innovation, cost-efficiency, and user-centered design. The report provides actionable recommendations to refine X-linjen’s service design, scale it to other regions, and address financial sustainability. By implementing these solutions and overcoming existing barriers, X-linjen can serve as a model for inclusive, flexible, and sustainable rural mobility, bridging critical gaps in access while fostering long-term societal and environmental benefits.

Creating Mixed Reality applications poses distinct challenges for development and design. One of the challenges is designing Mixed Reality application-specifc experiences in the wild. In this paper, we present a structured refection approach to revisit projects from the past. In applying this structured refection to the data collected during a nine-month industrial project, we unveiled the Virtuality-Reality Clash. To generate a sufcient data corpus, we structurally analysed git commits, tickets, emails, handwritten notes, and weekly snapshots of the 3D designs. The clash could be narrowed down in our data corpus to the situations in which we were fusing the real environment with the virtual content. Finally, we could fnd fve design patterns for MR experience. With these patterns, we aim to help developers and designers of MR applications identify situations where Virtuality and Reality clash and propose approaches to address them.

In mid-2023, we performed an experiment in autonomous buses in Stockholm, Sweden, to evaluate the role that social robots might have in such settings, and their effects on passengers' feeling of safety and security, given the absence of human drivers or clerks. To address the situations that may occur in autonomous public transit (APT), we compared an embodied agent to a disembodied agent. In this video publication, we showcase some of the things that worked with the interactions we created, and some problematic issues that we had not anticipated.

Rowing has great potential in Virtual Reality (VR) exergames as it requires physical effort and uses physical motion to map the locomotion in a virtual space. However, rowing in VR is currently restricted to locomotion along one axis, leaving 2D and 3D locomotion out of the scope. To facilitate rowing-based locomotion, we implemented three steering techniques based on head, hands, and feet movements for 2D and 3D VR environments.

Rowing has great potential in Virtual Reality (VR) exergames as it requires physical effort and uses physical motion to map the locomotion in a virtual space. However, rowing in VR is currently restricted to locomotion along one axis, leaving 2D and 3D locomotion out of the scope. To facilitate rowing-based locomotion, we implemented three steering techniques based on head, hands, and feet movements for 2D and 3D VR environments. To investigate these methods, we conducted a controlled experiment (N = 24) to assess the user performance, experience and VR sickness. We found that head steering leads to fast and precise steering in 2D and 3D, and hand steering is the most realistic. Feet steering had the largest performance difference between 2D and 3D but comparable precision to hands in 2D. Lastly, head steering is the least mentally demanding, and all methods had comparable VR sickness.

As programming is typically a static activity in front of a screen, we perform an initial exploration around the capabilities of block-based programming in the immersive space using Virtual Reality (VR) to make an early charting on how programming could involve moving the programmer's body. We created a block-based programming interface in a VR space called BlocklyVR based on the existing Blockly programming environment. To investigate programmer performance and experience in BlocklyVR, we conducted a controlled lab experiment (N = 20) with eight programming tasks that covered mathematical operations, if-statements, and function creation. Our initial exploration contributes by classifying movement types made by BlocklyVR programmers and reflecting on how these movements are related to the programming tasks. Additionally, our data suggests that participant performance in BlocklyVR was not affected compared to the 2D Blockly, even if participants were physically moving in VR space. We also found that the virtual reality sickness was marginal. Lastly, we identified four types of interaction that can potentially be employed by VR designers and developers aiming to convert a static task, like programming at a desk, into a "mobile"immersive experience.

Cross-platform development frameworks continue to play an important role in developing of mobile applications. There are a plethora of possible frameworks to choose between, and all claim to give developers an advantage in one or more aspects of the development cycle. To further shed light on this area, our research investigates the selection of mobile cross-platform frameworks by investigating criteria and methods for choosing the best suitable framework for the development context. Our study confirm previous research findings and with that anchor the categorisation for a cross-platform comparison taxonomy. Our research further contribute with a criteria check-list to apply for cross-platform framework selection and showcase its use through a comparative study of a cross-platform application implemented in two frameworks. Although showcasing novelty in the criteria checklist, further research is needed to make the checklist robust and streamlined for public use.

Walk-in-Place is an established locomotion technique for walking in virtual environments, as it incorporates body motion similar to regular walking. Although there is extensive research on the performance and experience of walking in virtual reality spaces, it typically requires minimal-to-moderate physical movement, e.g., stepping forward and turning around, to explore virtual spaces. Therefore, the question we ask ourselves in this work is how user experience and performance are affected when the user is actively moving in place. In this paper, we explored three body-steering methods for jogging-in-place in virtual environments: (1) head-, (2) hand-, and (3) torso-based. To investigate the performance of the proposed body-steering methods for jogging in virtual reality, we conducted a controlled lab experiment (N = 12) to assess task completion time, number of steps, and VR sickness. We discovered that hand- and torso-based methods require fewer steps than the head-based method, and the torso-based is slower than the other two. Moreover, the number of collisions and virtual reality sickness were comparable among the methods.

This paper describes an ideation workshop aiming to explore the intersection of sonic interactions and energy use. As part of a larger research project exploring the role that sound can play in efficient energy behaviours, the workshop encouraged users to look for overlaps between their home resource use, potential sonic feedback and the feelings and emotions elicited by both. The workshop design was successful in providing non-experts with space and tools to reflect on the complex relationship between household, sound, energy and our feelings towards them. On a more practical level, 15 “hotspots” were identified where sound and energy concerns could be potentially addressed with sonic interventions, and four speculative prototypes were developed during the workshop each one revealing original considerations and relationships between sound and energy to be developed further in future work.

Automatically adapting an interactive application to its use context is highly dependent on the existence of a declarative model. The Model-Based User Interface Development research made important progress in fully declarative specifications on interactive applications. However, the Abstract User Interface declarative models, such as task-based or communication-based models, are unfamiliar to designers and developers. This paper presents early explorations into a research program aimed at achieving fully declarative interactive applications: outlining a static concrete user interface and deriving the interaction from its affordances. The basic assumption is that for a well-designed user interface, the UI function can be derived from its form through affordance mechanisms. As the static aspects like the UI initial form are already being described declaratively in industrial practice, fully declarative interactive applications would result from the new research program.