We build on the increasing availability of Virtual Reality (VR) devices and
Web technologies to conduct behavioral experiments in VR using crowdsourcing
techniques. A new recruiting and validation method allows us to create a panel
of eligible experiment participants recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Using this panel, we ran three different crowdsourced VR experiments, each
reproducing one of three VR illusions: place illusion, embodiment illusion, and
plausibility illusion. Our experience and worker feedback on these experiments
show that conducting Web-based VR experiments using crowdsourcing is already
feasible, though some challenges---including scale---remain. Such crowdsourced
VR experiments on the Web have the potential to finally support replicable VR
experiments with diverse populations at a low cost.Comment: The Web Conference 2018 (WWW 2018); update citation forma