Diminished Reality for Attention Support
Overview
Diminished reality (DR) offers potential for attention support, including for adults with ADHD. Realizing this potential requires understanding how changes to perceived surroundings affect people’s ability to pursue their goals. Our research examines what people want diminished or preserved, and how different transformations affect attention and experience.
Our co-design study with students with ADHD grounds this work in everyday attentional challenges and participants’ imagined uses of DR. It introduces Attentional Diminishment as a human-centred approach that judges successful diminishment by its attentional effects. Our screen-filter studies examine visual transformations in a controlled VR environment, finding reduced perceived distraction during conversation alongside differing preferences and results across activities. Ongoing work on Selective Co-presence extends these questions to nearby people, exploring attention support while preserving desired aspects of sharing a space.
The Beyond Removal workshop poster brings together our co-design and ongoing co-presence work through abstraction and the broader direction of Adaptive Reality: environments that adapt to people’s goals, abilities, and changing activities. Such adaptation could support accessibility and agency by reducing barriers to everyday activities and helping people act on their intentions.
Related Projects
- Exploring Diminished Reality for Attention Support: A Co-Design Study with Students with ADHD
- Understanding the Effect of Diminished Reality Screen Filters
- Selective Co-presence: Diminishing Co-presence for Attention Support for Adults with ADHD
Workshop Poster
Beyond Removal: Diminished Reality for Attention Support in Adults with ADHD
Alex Noh, Duc Anh Nguyen, Anjun Zhu, Audrey Safikhani, Wolfgang Stuerzlinger, Lawrence Kim
Poster presented at the UIST 2026 Workshop on Cyber-Physical Systems for Accessibility and Ability Augmentation: Bridging Diverse Communities (non-archival).
