Research Roundup (#21)
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Welcome...
Welcome to the twenty-first-ever Research Roundup!🎉 A weekly catch-up on the latest developments in the field of XR research.
It’s been a busy week, so let's not hang around.
The Week in 3 (Sentences)
New research on interface design tested out a third person display for MR drone control systems showing improved spatial awareness, whilst microGEXT has been designed to reduce fatigue from text editing in VR making use of tiny hand movements.
Research this week on the user experience outlined mitigation strategies for better including visual and hearing impaired participants in VR user studies, alongside the development of a new consensus-driven scale for measuring presence.
And finally, investigation into the psychological effects of VR suggested improved satisfaction in VR sports when there are elements of fear, whilst virtual levitation during meditation showed increased arousal and stronger physical sensations but mostly in participants with open, curious attitudes.
The Week in 300 (words)
In the XR Digest towers we're big fans of WebXR and all the possibilities it holds. We're not big fans of sitting in a headset typing out an impossibly long URL or trying to copy and paste the address from an email. We're forever grateful then to researchers at Cambridge University and Hong Kong University for all their efforts in developing an editing system that works on finger based micro gestures. The idea of making a scissors gesture to cut, and touching a pinky to paste, has a lot of appeal. The user research also demonstrated an enhanced experience and lower fatigue, as you might expect. This is one development that can't come soon enough.
It's not often that we're keen on opinion pieces or position papers but sometimes one comes along that demands our attention. Researchers in Birmingham, UK, have decided to share their advice on making VR user studies more accessible to the visually impaired and hard of hearing. Based on their experiences running user studies they suggest a serious of challenges, including recruitment and travelling to the study, as well as mitigation strategies, such as employing an interpreter and accompanying them on their travel. It seems a fairly obvious point but if you're looking to make VR accessible then your user study will need to be accessible too.
Add finally, meditating in VR is all the rage as efficacy studies continue to demonstrate a range of benefits. These exploit one of the most powerful aspects of VR which is to create an illusion of being somewhere else. But what if the technology was used to create an illusion of levitating too? Researchers this week reported on attempts to invoke a sense of levitation through filming participants in a cross-legged meditative position, inserting it into their VR experience to watch as if a ‘mirror’, and then making the video 'levitate' during the mediation. Participants with an open and accepting attitude were more likely to fall for the illusion, whilst those more likely to distance themselves from their feelings, emotions and experiences did not. You can't fool me then.
Paper of the Week
It's not often that we like to discuss papers hidden behind paywalls as we believe that advances in science and technology should be shareable with everyone. However, the paper of the week this week caught our eye sufficiently that we'd break this rule.
Even though the market for VR headsets, and VR experiences, continues to grow there remain barriers to wider adoption. Part of navigating these barriers will be identifying them and overcoming them. And part of that endeavour surely needs to involve understanding why consumers engage with VR in the first place, if not part of education or healthcare.
Researchers in Italy therefore asked what motivates users to engage with the ‘Metaverse’ and what is the general profile of users.
They surveyed just shy of 500 owners of VR headsets, asking them questions about their demographics alongside questions on both their attitudes and their behaviours that were developed with expert input.
Responses were grouped according to motivations, with social gamers making up the largest group (49.8%), joined by ‘fun enthusiasts’ (22.4%), and ‘immersive skeptics’ (28.8%). Social gamers were generally in VR to engage with other people, fun enthusiasts to be entertained and play games, whilst ‘immersive skeptics' used their headsets to escape to an alternative world and were particularly sensitive to realism.
More importantly, motivations were not only hedonistic but also eudaimonic. Users weren't just using VR for pleasure, or avoiding pain, they were using it for personal growth and development too.
Whilst the study was focused on consumers in the UK and USA, just one section of the market, the insights nevertheless feel valuable. Indeed this would appear to be good news for both advocates of Social VR as well as those of VR for good. Whilst hedonism and entertainment are driving factors for some people this portrayal of the technology doesn't capture it all. If you're reading this newsletter then you of course knew that already, but it's nice to know we're not entirely alone!