Fundamental Challenges in User Experience Modeling for Immersive Technologies

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The recent consumer-level growth of interest in Virtual Reality (VR) has created a demand for compelling and engaging VR content. But how does a developer create innovative yet compelling content? How does the developer know whether the content they are developing will be comfortable to the user? How do they know if their designs will impact the user negatively causing them to have headaches or nausea? Moreover, if the developer determined that a particular part of their software will negatively impact users, how do they modify the content to improve the experience? Until now, there were relatively few VR developers worldwide due to the prohibitive cost of hardware and software development processes. This allowed these specific individuals to become experts in perception, stereoscopic 3D and multi-modal effects and spend a great deal of time iteratively testing their software to ensure that it meets their particular standards. VR hardware costs have dropped dramatically and freely available (yet powerful) game engines have opened the VR industry up not only to consumers, but also to software developers who do not have the background knowledge necessary to leverage to create effective content. To ensure that VR content is compelling, we need a practical model of user experience that can demonstrate how the choice of technology can impact the user, how the physical environment itself impacts the user, and ultimately provide freely-available developer tools to visualize these effects as constraints on the content. The proposed research program will fundamentally study and develop quantitative methods that enable researchers and developers to more effectively evaluate VR systems, interactive content and the effects of design choices on user experience. To do so, the establishment of an immersive user experience model validated by user study coupled with a standardized mechanism to evaluate experimental configurations is proposed. Visualization tools will be iteratively studied in terms of their effectiveness at visualizing/predicting constraints on user experience during the content development process through the use of expert focus groups and user study. The results of the proposed program will enable researchers and content designers to quantitatively predict how new technology and design choices may affect the user enabling the rapid creation of more effective experiences in a range of application domains. Beyond contributions to basic science, the methods, models, and tools developed have wide application in the development of content for interactive digital media (a key area of Canada’s ICT sector), education (immersive learning environments), health (diagnosis, collaborative healthcare), and manufacturing (diagnostics/process visualization), which are all key issues for the Canadian economy.