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Staging Virtual Reality Exhibits for Bystander Involvement in Semi-public Spaces
Abstract
As virtual reality becomes more popular to be used in semi-public spaces such as museums and other exhibition venues, the question on how to optimally stage such an experience arises. To foster interaction between participants and bystanders, to lower the primary threshold in regards to participation and to moderate the transition between real and virtual worlds we propose to augment a virtual hot-air balloon ride by a large scale floor projection in addition to a physical basket and other extras. Exhibited at a venue in Stuttgart, Germany a total of 140 participants evaluated our approach. We could confirm that adding a floor projection helped to attract additional users, to increased the overall motivation on using the installation, and to established a connection between the real and the virtual worlds.
Realities, Intelligences and Interfaces …. from Augmented, through Virtual, and Mixed; Artificial, Machine, and Natural …. technologies are here to stay and are investigated across disciplines. This contribution introduces studies and applications from various countries that are both creative and thought provoking to inspire and motivate readership and scholarship toward furthering this fast-advancing field.
Everyday mobile usage of AR and VR Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs) is becoming a feasible consumer reality. The current research agenda for HMDs has a strong focus on technological impediments (e.g. latency, field of view, locomotion, tracking, input) as well as perceptual aspect (e.g. distance compression, vergence-accomodation ). However, this ignores significant challenges in the usage and acceptability of HMDs in shared, social and public spaces. This workshop will explore these key challenges of HMD usage in shared, social contexts; methods for tackling the virtual isolation of the VR/AR user and the exclusion of collocated others; the design of shared experiences in shared spaces; and the ethical implications of appropriating the environment and those within it.
Artists often try to open up new experiences for people, challenging them to extend horizons and perception. This becomes particularly relevant when thinking about experiencing built environments: Here, technologies like Cave Automatic Virtual Environments (CAVE) or Head-Mounted Displays (HMD) can be used as a tool to offer richer experiences to the audience in both art installations and exhibitions. We have been developing several exhibitions tackling the challenges that come with exhibiting in (semi -) public spaces: how do we engage visitors in our exhibitions, what role do bystanders play and how can this be considered in the development and design process? The exhibitions were built in a chronological order (2015–2018) and increasing degree of immersion and interaction. For exhibition one (“step-in/Ideal Spaces”), we built a CAVE-like “tryptic” projection showing linear pre-rendered videos of seven different built environments. In exhibition two (“fly-over/Super Nubibus”) we build a replica of a hot-air-balloon and let people experience architecture from birds eye view using a HMD. Exhibition three (“cruise/Biketopia”) is also an immersive VR using a HMD, but from a very different angle. Here we use a bike to let people actively explore a space by regulating speed and direction of the bike. By using the discreet method of observation, we ensured that the visitors were not disturbed in their experience, which in turn would falsify our findings. So we are able to compare and discuss these three approaches in regards to the above mentioned criteria within this paper.
We investigate how spatial layout in public environments like workplaces, fairs, or conferences influences a user's VR experience. In particular, we compare environments in which an HMD user is (a) surrounded by other people, (b) physically separated by a barrier, or (c) in a separate room. In contrast to lab environments, users in public environments are affected by physical threats (for example, other people in the space running into them) but also cognitive threats (for example, not knowing, what happens in the real world), as known from research on proxemics or social facilitation. We contribute an extensive discussion of the factors influencing a user's VR experience in public. Based on this we conducted a between-subject design user study (N=58) to understand the differences between the three environments. As a result, we present implications regarding (1) spatial layout, (2) behavior of the VR system operator, and (3) the VR experience that helps both HCI researchers as well as practitioners to enhance users' VR experience in public environments.
Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs) are becoming ubiquitous; we are starting to see them deployed in public for different purposes. Museums, car companies and travel agencies use HMDs to promote their products. As a result, situations arise where users use them in public without experts supervision. This leads to challenges and opportunities, many of which are experienced in public display installations. For example, similar to public displays, public HMDs struggle to attract the passer-by's attention, but benefit from the honeypot effect that draws attention to them. Also passersby might be hesitant to wear a public HMD, due to the fear that its owner might not approve, or due to the perceived need for a prior permission. In this work, we discuss how public HMDs can benefit from research in public displays. In particular, based on the results of an in-the-wild deployment of a public HMD, we propose an adaptation of the audience funnel flow model of public display users to fit the context of public HMD usage. We discuss how public HMDs bring in challenges and opportunities, and create novel research directions that are relevant to both researchers in HMDs and researchers in public displays.
This paper discusses how different physically existing materials can be mapped on virtual textures in mixed reality environments by carrying out an explorative user study (n=101). For physical materials-in form of 3d trackable and moveable cubes-acrylic, wood and aluminum have been used. The virtual textures convey the impression of ceramic, fabric, glass, leather, paper, wood, acrylic, quartz, granite and aluminum. The study reveals which virtual textures match well with the different virtual textures and which do not match at all.
With the introduction of the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift in 2016 the old technology (Sutherland 1965) of Virtual Reality (VR) has experienced quite a boost: it seems foreseeable that the once " geek and nerd " (Mizer 2013) technology will attract a growing consumer audience and is going to find its place within the universe of entertainment. However, when consumer VR applications are presented the two focused key audiences are on the one hand the cliché young male (intended use: gaming) (Hern 2014) on the other hand high end professionals (intended use: engineering, etc.). If this trend continues not only a majority of potential users will be excluded but rather the applications and their content cannot tap the full potential of this technology at all. 1. Study and Hypothesis We re-evaluated a study from Heeter (1994) that questioned content preferences from users who have not experienced VR and probably had only a vague idea what it might be (since the study was conducted in 1993 it is not surprising that this technology had not yet found a widespread distribution). She stated that men are more likely to adore this technology and its interaction patterns: She clustered activities into seven categories (Virtual Fitness, Virtual Travel, Virtual Learning, Virtual Games, Virtual Sex, Virtual Combat, Virtual Presence)–in none of them the values of interest of women were higher than the values of the men. We conducted a similar study that questioned 168 test persons between the age of 17 to 50 (mean age: 27 years) of which 89 were female and 76 were male. Divergent from the cited study by Heeter the majority (more than 66%) of our test population had already experienced applications in VR at least once–whereby we noticed a significant gender difference–maybe due to the mentioned cliché: over 48% of our female test population has not tried VR at all yet (compared to 21% of males without VR experience). What needs to be done in order to delight women to give VR a chance in their media consumption habits? Are Heeter's results after almost 25 years–what is an aeon in computer technology–and with up-to-date media perception habits still correct? 2. Results If a female has tried VR at least once, we found out that not only women are nearly as highly interested in this technology as their male counterparts, they share also a comparable approach for visual quality: On a scale from 1 (uninterested) to 7 (highly interested) the male answered with a mean of 5.62 and the females with 5.39. With this finding we can state, that although the technology needs to advance the salient point of gender differences in VR is the differing demand of content and application scenarios that women ask for. This effect is similar to conventional media: i.e. the significant gender differences in TV content preferences (IfD Allensbach 2016) that show that males and females have different media consumption habits in general. 245
Virtual reality (VR) head-mounted displays (HMD) allow for a highly immersive experience and are currently becoming part of the living room entertainment. Current VR systems focus mainly on increasing the immersion and enjoyment for the user wearing the HMD (HMD user), resulting in all the bystanders (Non-HMD users) being excluded from the experience. We propose ShareVR, a proof-of-concept prototype using floor projection and mobile displays in combination with positional tracking to visualize the virtual world for the Non-HMD user, enabling them to interact with the HMD user and become part of the VR experience. We designed and implemented ShareVR based on the insights of an initial online survey (n=48) with early adopters of VR HMDs. We ran a user study (n=16) comparing ShareVRto a baseline condition showing how the interaction using ShareVR led to an increase of enjoyment, presence and social interaction. In a last step we implemented several experiences for ShareVR, exploring its design space and giving insights for designers of co-located asymmetric VR experiences.
Large displays are increasingly being placed in public places to support community and social activities. However, a major problem that has been observed with this new form of public interaction is the resistance by the public to participate. A main reason is due to the prominence of the affective aspect of the user experience. In particular, feelings of social embarrassment often act as a barrier. Our paper is concerned with understanding why this is the case and considering how we can attempt to overcome these aspects through improving the design of public interaction. Our focus is on how groups of people socialize around large public displays, the way they move towards them, congregate around them and change from being onlookers to participants and back again. We describe a system - the Opinionizer - which we designed and placed in two authentic social gatherings, intended to encourage socializing and interaction. We present our findings in terms of the patterns of physical and social engagement that take place around it. We then present a model of public interaction flow, which we use as the basis from which to provide design recommendations for encouraging public participation.
Research Methods in Human-Computer Interaction is a comprehensive guide to performing research and is essential reading for both quantitative and qualitative methods. Since the first edition was published in 2009, the book has been adopted for use at leading universities around the world, including Harvard University, Carnegie-Mellon University, the University of Washington, the University of Toronto, HiOA (Norway), KTH (Sweden), Tel Aviv University (Israel), and many others. Chapters cover a broad range of topics relevant to the collection and analysis of HCI data, going beyond experimental design and surveys, to cover ethnography, diaries, physiological measurements, case studies, crowdsourcing, and other essential elements in the well-informed HCI researcher's toolkit. Continual technological evolution has led to an explosion of new techniques and a need for this updated 2nd edition, to reflect the most recent research in the field and newer trends in research methodology. This Research Methods in HCI revision contains updates throughout, including more detail on statistical tests, coding qualitative data, and data collection via mobile devices and sensors. Other new material covers performing research with children, older adults, and people with cognitive impairments.
In recent times, many public spaces have virtual reality (VR) games for entertainment (e.g., VR amusement parks). Therefore, VR games should be attractive not only for players but also for bystanders. Current VR systems still focus primarily on enhancing the experience of head mounted display (HMD) users; thus, bystanders without an HMD cannot enjoy the experience to the same extent as HMD users. We propose "ReverseCAVE" towards a shareable VR experience [1]. This is a proof-of-concept prototype for public VR visualization using CAVE-based projection with translucent screens for bystanders. The screen surrounds the HMD user, and the VR environment is projected onto the screens. Bystanders can see the HMD user and VR environment simultaneously, and capture photographs to share with others. Thus, ReverseCAVE can enhance the bystanders' public VR experience considerably and expand the utility of VR.
A head-mounted display (HMD) immerses users in a virtual world, but separates them from outsiders in the real world. We present FrontFace, which is a novel HMD that combines an eye-tracker with a front-facing screen, to lower the communication barrier between HMD users and outsiders. The front-facing screen reveals user attention (e.g., the users eye motions) and user presence in the virtual or real world by displaying the scene in the virtual world or a skin background respectively, enabling eye-contact interactions between the HMD user and the outsiders. FrontFace has the following benefits. Firstly, it communicates the presence of the HMD user to outsiders; secondly, it reveals the player's visual attention by introducing the HMD users originally occluded eye motions, enabling outsiders to make sense of the HMD user's reaction in the virtual world or the real world. Three interactive techniques for the outsiders to initiate communication to HMD users are proposed: they are tap-trigger, hand-gesture trigger, and voice-trigger interactions. A small focus group provided feedback.
BRENT EDWARD INSKO: Passive Haptics Significantly Enhances Virtual Environments (Under the direction of Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.) One of the most disconcertingly unnatural properties of most virtual environments (VEs) is the ability of the user to pass through objects. I hypothesize that passive haptics, augmenting a high-fidelity visual virtual environment with low-fidelity physical objects, will markedly improve both sense of presence and spatial knowledge training transfer. The low-fidelity physical models can be constructed from cheap, easy- to-assemble materials such as styrofoam, plywood, and particle board.
The study explored the impact of physically touching a virtual object on how realistic the VE seems to the user. Subjects in a "no touch" group picked up a 3D virtual image of a kitchen plate in a VE, using a traditional 3D wand. "See and touch" subjects physically picked up a virtual plate possessing solidity and weight, using a mixed-reality force feedback technique. Afterwards, subjects made predictions about the properties of other virtual objects they saw but did not interact with in the VE. "See and touch" subjects predicted these objects would be more solid, heavier, and more likely to obey gravity than the "no touch" group. Results provide converging evidence for the value of adding physical qualities to virtual objects. The study first empirically demonstrates the effectiveness of mixed reality as a simple, safe, inexpensive technique for adding physical texture and force feedback cues to virtual objects with large freedom of motion. Examples of practical applications are discussed.
Hybrid virtual reality touch table - An immersive collaborative platform for public explanatory use of cultural objects and sites
- E Sundén
- I Lundgren
- A Ynnerman
Pictures at an exposition
- M Mancini