HCI Lessons From PlayStation VR

PlayStation VR has quickly built up a significant user-base of over a million headsets and its own ecosystem of games across a variety of genres. These games form part of a rapidly evolving testing ground for design solutions which can usefully inform HCI design for virtual reality. This paper reviews every PlayStation VR title released in the first three months of its lifecycle in order to identify emerging themes for locomotion. These themes are discussed with respect to the lessons learned as part of the on-going development of an Environmental Narrative game for PlayStation VR as part of the Horizon 2020 REVEAL project

Public HMDs: Modeling and Understanding User Behavior Around Public Head-Mounted Displays

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

Rapid, continuous movement between nodes as an accessible virtual reality locomotion technique

The confounding effect of player locomotion on the vestibulo-ocular reflex is one of the principal causes of motion sickness in immersive virtual reality. Continuous motion is particularly problematic for stationary user configurations, and teleportation has become the prevailing approach for providing accessible locomotion. Unfortunately, teleportation can also increase disorientation and reduce a player’s sense of presence within a VR environment. This paper presents an alternative locomotion technique designed to preserve accessibility while maintaining feelings of presence. This is a node-based navigation system which allows the player to move between predefined node positions using a rapid, continuous, linear motion. An evaluation was undertaken to compare this locomotion technique with commonly used, teleportation-based and continuous walking approaches. Thirty-six participants took part in a study which examined motion sickness and presence for each technique, while navigating around a virtual house using PlayStation VR. Contrary to intuition, we show that rapid movement speeds reduce players’ feelings of motion sickness as compared to continuous movement at normal walking speeds

Game vaporware as design fictions

In this research we examine games, and games hardware, that can be classed as ‘Vaporware’. More specifically software that was never written, or hardware that was never built, and consequently no one ever played. In particular we are considering such vaporware as examples of ‘Design Fiction’ as they once represented speculative visions of the future based on emerging technology. Vaporware is a term generally used to describe products that are announced to the general public but are never actually manufactured. Whereas design fiction is a term used to describe plausible ‘diegetic prototypes’ that are built, or suggested, to create an opportunity for discourse about possible technological futures. Whilst it could be argued vaporware games are simply failed products that were justifiably scrapped before joining the long lists of come-to-nothing games and consoles, by reviewing examples we offer an alternative view that they can serve as objects of discourse for exposing the potential futures of video games and thus could be considered in terms of design fiction. To add further weight to the argument that games can be useful as design fictions we then consider “Game of Drones”, an example of a design fiction that pivots around a game element, to illustrate how the deliberate use of design fiction can stimulate discourse around game futures (in this case the growing promotion of ‘gamified’ services as means of engaging users). Whilst the notion of designing games that will never be built may seem paradoxical in relation to the Games industry’s predominantly commercial aims, we believe that the deliberate adoption of design fiction as a practice within game design would facilitate the emergence of meaningful discussions around future gaming without the frustrations induced by vaporware

Affordances of Mobile Virtual Reality and their Role in Learning and Teaching

In this paper, we report the technological affordances of a virtual reality smartphone-driven educational app – Google Expeditions. Based on a large exploratory study, we discuss how these empirically-derived affordances support pedagogical approaches of experiential learning, bridging virtual fieldwork with physical field trips, and inquiry-based learning

"They’re Just Tixel Pits, Man": Disputing the 'Reality' of Virtual Reality Pornography through the Story Completion Method

Pornography is a substantial part of humans' everyday interaction with computers, yet to date the topic has been underconsidered by HCI. Here, we examine some of the common cultural ideals non-experts constructed of a 'new' pornographic experience - Virtual Reality (VR) Porn - through use of the 'Story Completion Method'. Forty five participants completed a story stem about a male character who was about to have his "very first virtual reality porn experience". Through our analysis, we demonstrate a narrative of a 'perfect', idealised sexual experience, as well as one which emphasised the imagined 'precarious' and dangerous consequences around this technology use. We indicate how the stories reproduced ideals around heteronormativity and hegemonic masculinity, suggesting an agenda of 'Designing for Eroticism' as a tactic which could avoid such problematic discourses. We also suggest the opportunities and challenges presented through use of the 'Story Completion Method'

Social acceptability of Virtual Reality Interaction: Experiential factors and design implications

Virtual Reality (VR) has been the hot topic of discussion over the past couple of years. A major part of the interest in VR comes from the fact that the technological aspects of VR has grown dramatically and today there are lots of choices for VR users based on their budget ranging from cardboard VR requiring mobile devices all the way to high end VR devices requiring high end computers. When the user wears the VR device and the headphones, he or she is separated from the real world and can no longer see, hear, or interact with anyone else present in the same context. When the context is public and there are other people around, the separation can be problematic. Added to the separation, the user interacts with the system using a form of motion controller for input coupled with head movements to look around the virtual world. This brings forth the point of questioning the social acceptability of virtual reality and the need to identify influential experiential factors from the perspective of those using the VR in public context and the others present in the same context. To answer the research questions, a series of field tests were conducted with users in the public context of a university. The empirical research of this thesis consists of inter-views, surveys, and observations, including both qualitative and quantitative data from the users and spectators in addition to three co-creation sessions with user experience experts to identify key design principles. The empirical findings of this thesis suggest that it is socially acceptable to use VR de-vices in a public context of a university and a majority of users and spectators do not find it as awkward or rude to use the technology. Additionally, while it may feel a little out of place, once a user starts the VR experience, he or she will forget about the others present and will start to enjoy the sense of being in a virtual location while in the same place as others. Based on the findings, the most important experiential factors from the perspective of users are identified as freedom of interaction, uninterruptable immersion, un-intrusive communication, freedom to switch realities, a sense of safety, a sense of pri-vacy, having a shared experience, and a sense of belonging. From the perspective of the spectators a shared experience, enticing their curiosity, providing relevant experiences, being a norm, and a sense of privacy are found as the influential factors. Finally, a set of design principles with 11 distinct items across six sections of content, interaction, safety, privacy, communication, and connectedness are identified. The insights of this thesis can be used in the future as a reference point for creating so-cially acceptable VR experiences and understanding the most important factors from the perspective of VR users as well as others present in the context