Florian Müller

I am an Assistant Professor for Mobile Human-Computer Interaction at TU Darmstadt where I lead the Urban Interaction Lab. My research follows the vision of seamless mobile interaction in and with the physical world, where digital information, AI agents, and physical environments merge into a unified eXtended Reality. Towards this vision, I explore novel interaction techniques for mobile XR and collaboration with AI systems. My approach is informed by a deep understanding of body-centric, tangible and haptic interfaces, as well as strong technical expertise, aiming to make the interaction more efficient and accurate but also more enjoyable and fun.

latest publications

2026

Context Is Cue-Cial: Assessing the Interpretation of Social Signals from Non-anthropomorphic Robots in Different Contexts

Aparajita Chowdhury, Ana Carrasco, Florian Müller, Aino Ahtinen, Kaisa Väänänen, Albrecht Schmidt, and Jan Leusmann

In Social Robotics + AI, 2026

Springer Nature

Humans excel at understanding social cues in communication, but robots struggle. Social cues are crucial for humans to interpret the intentions of their communication partners. Research indicates that we typically interpret the actions of anthropomorphic robots analogously to their human counterparts, paving a clear path to the design of appropriate social cues. For non-anthropomorphic robots, however, it is an open question how humans interpret social cues with different output modalities and in different contexts. Our study investigates whether social cues signaled by typical non-anthropomorphic modalities such as lights, sounds, and gestures are consistently interpreted across people and contexts. We, therefore, conducted a contextual investigation in a hospital, derived scenarios from co-design workshop, and tested 103 cues collected from the literature in a large online survey (N = 1545). Our results demonstrate that most human interpretations vary by context, highlighting the need to design dynamic and adaptive social cues for interactive robotic systems.
If It’s Safe, Don’t Ask: Decreasing Frustration through User Involvement for Risky Robot Behaviors

Jan Leusmann, Sarah Schömbs, Maximilian Diedrich, and Florian Müller

In Proceedings of the 21st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI ’26), 2026

PDF

Human–robot collaboration faces a speed–accuracy trade-off (SAT): higher speed lowers latency but increases errors; lower speed improves accuracy but extends waiting time. Both pathways can frustrate users in research and real-world deployments. Despite this importance, the impact of SAT on frustration and how to mitigate it remains underexplored. We conducted a user study (N = 24) in which participants collaborated with a robot in an assembly task. We investigate three levels of SAT (conservative, moderate, risky), and examine how uncertainty communication and offering decision autonomy affect user frustration. Our results show that user frustration is highest for risky robot behavior. User involvement decreased frustration for risky behaviors, but increased it for conservative ones, while verbal uncertainty communication had no effects. We further found that perceived transparency, agency, intelligence, and utility of the robot increase with conservative SAT, with user workload decreasing. We propose that user involvement is advisable in higher-risk settings to mitigate user frustration, whereas autonomous operation is preferable in lower-risk scenarios.
Anticipation Without Acceleration: Benefits of Shared Gaze in Collocated Augmented Reality Collaboration

Julian Rasch, Vladislav Dmitrievic Rusakov, Jan Leusmann, Florian Müller, and Albrecht Schmidt

In Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2026

PDF ACM

Knowing what collaborators attend to is essential. Previous studies demonstrated that shared gaze enhances coordination and social connectedness in remote settings. In collocated settings, gaze can be both naturally observable and technologically augmented. AR enables gaze cues to be rendered explicitly in the environment. To investigate if and how such cues are beneficial in collocated AR collaboration, we examined both qualitative and quantitative effects across three task types (puzzle, negotiation, search) and two spatial setups (plane, room), focusing on task completion time and the collaborative experience. In our user study with 24 dyads (n=48), we varied gaze visibility and measured task performance, user preference, social connectedness, and shared attention. Our results show that sharing gaze in collocated collaborative AR can increase shared attention, is perceived as helpful, and improves the user experience, similar to remote collaboration, but has a limited impact on the actual task completion time across the chosen tasks.

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