Virtual Field Studies

Ville Mäkelä, Rivu Radiah, Saleh Alsherif, Mohamed Khamis, Chong Xiao, Lisa Borchert, Albrecht Schmidt, Florian Alt
2020 Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems  
Figure 1 . We explore whether field studies on public displays can be conducted in virtual reality. In two user studies we compare user behavior between a real public space (left) and a virtual public space (middle). For one study, we developed a gesture-controlled display for both environments (right). ABSTRACT Field studies on public displays can be difficult, expensive, and time-consuming. We investigate the feasibility of using virtual reality (VR) as a test-bed to evaluate deployments of
more » ... blic displays. Specifically, we investigate whether results from virtual field studies, conducted in a virtual public space, would match the results from a corresponding real-world setting. We report on two empirical user studies where we compared audience behavior around a virtual public display in the virtual world to audience behavior around a real public display. We found that virtual field studies can be a powerful research tool, as in both studies we observed largely similar behavior between the settings. We discuss the opportunities, challenges, and limitations of using virtual reality to conduct field studies, and provide lessons learned from our work that can help researchers decide whether to employ VR in their research and what factors to account for if doing so.
doi:10.1145/3313831.3376796 dblp:conf/chi/MakelaRAKXB0A20 fatcat:z4wbmpehizfcpnbt4lhxoyy4pq