2020 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR)

Designing usable and effective 3D User Interfaces and 3D Interaction Techniques is very challenging for Virtual Reality system developers and human factors specialists. Indeed, time consuming empirical evaluation is necessary to have an idea about the goodness of the 3D User Interface (3DUI) and the 3D Interaction Technique (3DIT) at the end of their development lifecycle. This may induce a huge loss of time if the result appears not to be satisfying in the end. Moreover, 3DUI evaluation is much more complex than 2D User Interfaces evaluation which is due to heterogeneous Virtual Reality (VR) devices and 3DIT. The aim of this work is to provide a framework allowing developers and experimenters to quickly evaluate 3DUIs and 3DITs during the design and the development lifecycle. The proposed framework is divided into two tools. The first one enables to create an evaluation protocol based on a knowledge database using two data mining algorithms, the "C4.5" to avoid from impossible combinations between devices and indicators and the "Spv Assoc Tree" to build a decision tree between indicators and factors. The second tool of the framework is an Evaluation Virtual Environment (EVE) to perform the evaluation according the protocol created with the first tool.

Download Full-text

Exploring Button Designs for Mid-air Interaction in Virtual Reality: A Hexa-metric Evaluation of Key Representations and Multi-modal Cues

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction ◽

10.1145/3457141 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 5 (EICS) ◽

pp. 1-26

Author(s):

Carlos Bermejo ◽

Lik Hang Lee ◽

Paul Chojecki ◽

David Przewozny ◽

Pan Hui

Keyword(s):

Virtual Reality ◽

User Interfaces ◽

Physical Environment ◽

Fundamental Issue ◽

Haptic Cues

The continued advancement in user interfaces comes to the era of virtual reality that requires a better understanding of how users will interact with 3D buttons in mid-air. Although virtual reality owns high levels of expressiveness and demonstrates the ability to simulate the daily objects in the physical environment, the most fundamental issue of designing virtual buttons is surprisingly ignored. To this end, this paper presents four variants of virtual buttons, considering two design dimensions of key representations and multi-modal cues (audio, visual, haptic). We conduct two multi-metric assessments to evaluate the four virtual variants and the baselines of physical variants. Our results indicate that the 3D-lookalike buttons help users with more refined and subtle mid-air interactions (i.e. lesser press depth) when haptic cues are available; while the users with 2D-lookalike buttons unintuitively achieve better keystroke performance than the 3D counterparts. We summarize the findings, and accordingly, suggest the design choices of virtual reality buttons among the two proposed design dimensions.

Download Full-text

Investigating a Virtual Reality-based Emergency Response Scenario and Intelligent User Interface for First Responders

Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting ◽

10.1177/1071181320641513 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 64 (1) ◽

pp. 2114-2118

Author(s):

Randall Spain ◽

Jason Saville ◽

Barry Lui ◽

Donia Slack ◽

Edward Hill ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Virtual Reality ◽

User Interface ◽

Emergency Response ◽

User Interfaces ◽

Mental Workload ◽

First Responders ◽

Lessons Learned ◽

Future Research ◽

Intelligent User Interfaces ◽

Intelligent User Interface

Because advances in broadband capabilities will soon allow first responders to access and use many forms of data when responding to emergencies, it is becoming critically important to design heads-up displays to present first responders with information in a manner that does not induce extraneous mental workload or cause undue interaction errors. Virtual reality offers a unique medium for envisioning and testing user interface concepts in a realistic and controlled environment. In this paper, we describe a virtual reality-based emergency response scenario that was designed to support user experience research for evaluating the efficacy of intelligent user interfaces for firefighters. We describe the results of a usability test that captured firefighters’ feedback and reactions to the VR scenario and the prototype intelligent user interface that presented them with task critical information through the VR headset. The paper concludes with lessons learned from our development process and a discussion of plans for future research.

Download Full-text