Fundamental Challenges in User Experience Modeling for Immersive Technologies

最近，消费者对虚拟现实（VR）的兴趣不断增长，催生了对引人入胜的虚拟现实内容的需求。但开发者如何才能创造出既创新又吸引人的内容呢？开发者如何知道他们所开发的内容是否会让用户感到舒适？他们如何知道他们的设计是否会对用户产生负面影响，导致他们头痛或恶心？此外，如果开发人员确定软件的特定部分会对用户产生负面影响，他们如何修改内容以改善体验？到目前为止，由于硬件和软件开发过程的成本过高，全球VR开发者相对较少。这让这些特定的人成为感知、立体3D和多模态效果方面的专家，并花费大量时间反复测试他们的软件，以确保它符合他们的特定标准。VR硬件成本大幅下降，免费（但功能强大）的游戏引擎不仅为消费者打开了VR行业的大门，也为那些没有必要的背景知识来创造有效内容的软件开发者打开了大门。为了确保VR内容具有吸引力，我们需要一个实用的用户体验模型，能够展示技术的选择如何影响用户，物理环境本身如何影响用户，并最终提供免费的开发人员工具，将这些影响可视化为内容的约束。拟议的研究计划将从根本上研究和开发定量方法，使研究人员和开发人员能够更有效地评估VR系统，互动内容以及设计选择对用户体验的影响。为此，提出了建立一个通过用户研究验证的沉浸式用户体验模型，并结合标准化机制来评估实验配置。通过使用专家焦点小组和用户研究，将反复研究可视化工具在内容开发过程中可视化/预测用户体验限制方面的有效性。拟议项目的结果将使研究人员和内容设计师能够定量预测新技术和设计选择如何影响用户，从而在一系列应用领域快速创造更有效的体验。除了对基础科学的贡献之外，所开发的方法、模型和工具还广泛应用于交互式数字媒体（加拿大信息通信技术部门的一个关键领域）、教育（沉浸式学习环境）、健康（诊断、协作式医疗保健）和制造业（诊断/过程可视化）的内容开发，这些都是加拿大经济的关键问题。

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.