Measuring user experience for virtual reality

In recent years, Virtual Reality (VR) and 3D User Interfaces (3DUI) have seen a drastic increase in popularity, especially in terms of consumer-ready hardware and software. These technologies have the potential to create new experiences that combine the advantages of reality and virtuality. While the technology for input as well as output devices is market ready, only a few solutions for everyday VR - online shopping, games, or movies - exist, and empirical knowledge about performance and user preferences is lacking. All this makes the development and design of human-centered user interfaces for VR a great challenge. This thesis investigates the evaluation and design of interactive VR experiences. We introduce the Virtual Reality User Experience (VRUX) model based on VR-specific external factors and evaluation metrics such as task performance and user preference. Based on our novel UX evaluation approach, we contribute by exploring the following directions: shopping in virtual environments, as well as text entry and menu control in the context of everyday VR. Along with this, we summarize our findings by design spaces and guidelines for choosing optimal interfaces and controls in VR.In den letzten Jahren haben Virtual Reality (VR) und 3D User Interfaces (3DUI) stark an Popularität gewonnen, insbesondere bei Hard- und Software im Konsumerbereich. Diese Technologien haben das Potenzial, neue Erfahrungen zu schaffen, die die Vorteile von Realität und Virtualität kombinieren. Während die Technologie sowohl für Eingabe- als auch für Ausgabegeräte marktreif ist, existieren nur wenige Lösungen für den Alltag in VR - wie Online-Shopping, Spiele oder Filme - und es fehlt an empirischem Wissen über Leistung und Benutzerpräferenzen. Dies macht die Entwicklung und Gestaltung von benutzerzentrierten Benutzeroberflächen für VR zu einer großen Herausforderung. Diese Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit der Evaluation und Gestaltung von interaktiven VR-Erfahrungen. Es wird das Virtual Reality User Experience (VRUX)- Modell eingeführt, das auf VR-spezifischen externen Faktoren und Bewertungskennzahlen wie Leistung und Benutzerpräferenz basiert. Basierend auf unserem neuartigen UX-Evaluierungsansatz leisten wir einen Beitrag, indem wir folgende interaktive Anwendungsbereiche untersuchen: Einkaufen in virtuellen Umgebungen sowie Texteingabe und Menüsteuerung im Kontext des täglichen VR. Die Ergebnisse werden außerdem mittels Richtlinien zur Auswahl optimaler Schnittstellen in VR zusammengefasst

Geospatial analysis and living urban geometry

This essay outlines how to incorporate morphological rules within the exigencies of our technological age. We propose using the current evolution of GIS (Geographical Information Systems) technologies beyond their original representational domain, towards predictive and dynamic spatial models that help in constructing the new discipline of "urban seeding". We condemn the high-rise tower block as an unsuitable typology for a living city, and propose to re-establish human-scale urban fabric that resembles the traditional city. Pedestrian presence, density, and movement all reveal that open space between modernist buildings is not urban at all, but neither is the open space found in today's sprawling suburbs. True urban space contains and encourages pedestrian interactions, and has to be designed and built according to specific rules. The opposition between traditional self-organized versus modernist planned cities challenges the very core of the urban planning discipline. Planning has to be re-framed from being a tool creating a fixed future to become a visionary adaptive tool of dynamic states in evolution

MEMORYSCAPES: PLACE, MOBILITY, AND MEMORY IN THE POST-DICATORIAL SOUTHERN CONE

The urban landscapes of Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay lay bare the markings of these countries‘ turbulent political and economic pasts, their transition to democracy, and diverse efforts to preserve memory. Claudia Feld‘s observation that these countries have experienced a \u27memory boom‘—not a deficit—in recent years manifests itself as much culturally and politically as it does spatially, through the creation of memorials, memory parks, museums, and memory-related performances and discourses. Along these same lines, narratives of memory recur among artistic and cultural works of the post-dictatorial Southern Cone—not exclusively among memorials and other designated sites of recollection, but along the everyday corridors and causeways of some of South America‘s most populous cities, and rather unexpectedly, among seemingly generic sites of consumerism and transit. In fact, my reading of literary and cinematic works by Alberto Fuguet, Sergio Chejfec, Ignacio Agüero, and Fabián Bielinsky, and my examination of Uruguay‘s Punta Carretas Shopping Center, suggests that memory has not been easily corralled into designated sites nor erased through modern spaces and lifestyles; instead, each of the works analyzed in this study reveals that palimpsests of memory can appear often and, in many cases, spontaneously among all angles of the cityscape

The Digital Rear Window : Epistemologies of Digital Transparency

In this essay, I discuss digital reality production and transparency’s role in it. I argue that the promise of transparency—the visual access to objective reality which further enables necessary democratic action—is jeopardized in the digital environment. I analyze some of the reasons for this. First, transparency is no longer an issue that is clearly defined by law, and it increasingly works as an ambiguous normative concept. As such, its scope is unclear. Second, the structural qualities of transparency as a metaphor and as a medium reveal the limits of transparency to portray reality on a theoretical level. Third, the way in which transparency discourse participates in digital reality production makes it even more difficult to decipher the “ground truth,” if indeed, there is one. Because digital transparency builds on a twofold mediation of reality—transparency as a medium itself and algorithms as a medium of digital transparency—seeing with one’s own eyes no longer guarantees a privileged access to reality. I conclude that although transparency is traditionally seen as one of the best tools of democracy, along with the emergence of individualized digital realities and the decline of a shared understanding of truth, the truth-transparency nexus may be unraveling.Non peer reviewe

Virtually Queer: Subjectivity Across Gender Boundaries in Second Life

This is an autoethnographic study of one person\u27s experience performing across gender lines in Second Life. Although there is a rich literature on gender crossing in virtual worlds, dating back to the text-only days, there are few ethnographic reports and fewer still from the vantage point of the performer. The paper is presented as a narrative recounting, alternating voice between the performed female persona in the virtual world and the author\u27s performed male identity in real life. Taking the perspective of Queer Theory, the paper problematizes gender performance in any world, and takes tentative steps toward expanding the notion of identity queering to nonsexual aspects of the individual as well as the prospect of queering reality itself

Selling (un)real estate with "Shi(势)-nema": manipulation, not persuasion, in China's contemporary cinematic-cities

Investigating what has been called the mise-en-scene of Capitalism's Second Coming in China, this essay explores how cinematic principles have become divorced from the medium of cinema and can be found operating within contemporary Chinese urban spaces in order to increase the efficacy of real estate showroom settings. Specifically, we explore the effects of affectively distributed networks of human, architectural and nonhuman " actors " that appear to be arranged in such a way as to manipulate and impact the thoughts, feelings and actions of potential buyers. To best expose the effectiveness of these modern urban assemblages, we engineer an encounter between the Chinese concept of shi (势) – described by sinologist-philosopher François Julien as the " inherent potentiality at work in configuration " – and that of cinematicty, wherein the cinema and city are recognised as co-determining and mutually enabling site/ sights