Professor Kim Kwang-uk and his research team at Hanyang University received the Best Paper Award at ISMAR 2025, the world's leading international conference on augmented and mixed reality. The team presented groundbreaking research demonstrating that artificial intelligence(AI) with spatial awareness enhances social interactions with humans.

With advances in large language models (LLMs), AI is evolving beyond a simple conversational assistant into an ‘LLM Agent’ capable of understanding and responding to user contexts. Professor Kim’s team focused on how AI’s ability to perceive, not only linguistic context but also the user’s physical space, could transform human-AI relationships.

They experimentally tested changes in human interaction when AI recognizes spatial information. The study emphasized environmental context and spatial data roles in human-AI interaction. Participants engaged in AI counseling conversations under three spatial awareness conditions, with measures including copresence, trust, therapist alliance, and self-disclosure.

Results showed higher satisfaction and immersion when AI actively incorporated spatial cues, such as referencing objects nearby , for instance, "There’s a doll beside you,” prompting participants to describe themselves more deeply and express emotions more openly.

Professor Kim said, “When AI recognizes both users' physical space and reality, it is perceived as a more natural and trustworthy partner beyond mere language comprehension.”

This research highlights the future potential of spatially-aware LLM agents as augmented reality(AR) applications for counseling, education, and healthcare. The team anticipates this technology to be a crucial turning point expanding AI into human living spaces.

Funded by the National Research Foundation of Korea and the Institute for Information & Communications Technology Promotion, the paper When LLMs Recognize Your Space: Research on Experiences with Spatially Aware LLM Agents lists Hanyang University researchers Oh Seung-woo and Ahn Na-kyung as co-first authors, Jo Young-wook and Jung Myeon-gul as authors, and Kim Kwang-uk as corresponding author.