Immersidata Analysis: Four Case Studies (original) (raw)
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Continuous archival and analysis of user data in virtual and immersive game environments
ACM CARPE, 2005
We present a continuous and unobtrusive approach to analyze and reason about users' personal experiences of interacting with virtual and game environments. Focusing on an immersive educational game environment that we are developing, this is achieved through the capture and storage of user's movements and events that occur as a result of interactions with and within immersive environments. Termed immersidata, we then query and analyze immersidata to make sense of user behavior. Two example approaches are described. The first describes an application ISIS (Immersidata analySIS) that provides a tool for analysis of user behavior/experience through the indexing of immersidata with video clips of students' gaming sessions. This approach is described by way of an example to identify the causes of interruptions or breaks in interactions/focus of attention to facilitate the identification of problematic design. In our second example we describe our work towards classifying students' performance through immersidata. To this aim, we describe one example of transforming immersidata into multivariate time series and then by applying feature subset selection techniques we identify the features that differentiate students. We describe the application of this approach to identify novice and expert players with 90% accuracy. One proposal is to use this to customize the game environment appropriate to the students' ability. Finally, we present future directions for the continuation of the work presented herein and also, the application of the immersidata system to capture, store and analyze personal behavior/experiences and provide appropriate feedback in our work and home environments.
Understanding of User Behavior in Immersive Environments
Touch in Virtual Environments: Haptics and the Design of Interactive Systems, 2001
Immersive evironments can facilitate the virtual interaction between people, objects, places, and databases. Immersion has several varied practical applications. It can serve as an aid to engineering applications. Immersion can also be used to understand and aid the disabled. These environments result in the production of large amounts of data for transmission and storage. Data types such as images, audio, video, and text are an integral part of immersive environments and many researchers in the past have addressed their management. ...
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Frontiers in Virtual Reality
Measuring a gamer’s behaviour and perceived gaming experience in real-time can be crucial not only to assess game usability, but to also adjust the game play and content in real-time to maximize the experience per user. For this purpose, affective and physiological monitoring tools (e.g., wearables) have been used to monitor human influential factors (HIFs) related to quality of experience (QoE). Representative factors may include the gamer’s level of engagement, stress, as well as sense of presence and immersion, to name a few. However, one of the major challenges the community faces today is being able to accurately transfer the results obtained in controlled laboratory settings to uncontrolled everyday settings, such as the gamer’s home. In this paper, we describe an instrumented virtual reality (VR) headset, which directly embeds a number of dry ExG sensors (electroencephalography, EEG; electrocardiography, ECG; and electrooculography, EOG) to allow for gamer behaviour assessmen...
We describe a continuous and unobtrusive approach to capture data amassed from user-player interactions with virtual or game environments. Central to this is a tool called ISIS (Immersidata analySIS) to query and identify data of interest and to index events within video recordings of game sessions. Analysis of the associated data and video clips help us to understand user-players’ behaviour and experience to assess and inform the design and development of games. ISIS supports six queries to identify: actions and activities, breaks in interaction caused by reflection or ineffective and problematic design, navigation problems caused by user disorientation, and events or tasks that are the most difficult to perform in a game. In the development of an educational serious game, we illustrate how our approach can help inform redesign.
Studying human behavior with virtual reality: The Unity Experiment Framework
Behavior Research Methods, 2019
Virtual reality (VR) systems offer a powerful tool for human behavior research. The ability to create three-dimensional visual scenes and to measure responses to the visual stimuli enables the behavioral researcher to test hypotheses in a manner and scale that were previously unfeasible. For example, a researcher wanting to understand interceptive timing behavior might wish to violate Newtonian mechanics so that objects can move in novel 3-D trajectories. The same researcher might wish to collect such data with hundreds of participants outside the laboratory, and the use of a VR headset makes this a realistic proposition. The difficulty facing the researcher is that sophisticated 3-D graphics engines (e.g., Unity) have been created for game designers rather than behavioral scientists. To overcome this barrier, we have created a set of tools and programming syntaxes that allow logical encoding of the common experimental features required by the behavioral scientist. The Unity Experiment Framework (UXF) allows researchers to readily implement several forms of data collection and provides them with the ability to easily modify independent variables. UXF does not offer any stimulus presentation features, so the full power of the Unity game engine can be exploited. We use a case study experiment, measuring postural sway in response to an oscillating virtual room, to show that UXF can replicate and advance upon behavioral research paradigms. We show that UXF can simplify and speed up the development of VR experiments created in commercial gaming software and facilitate the efficient acquisition of large quantities of behavioral research data.
Remote Collection of Physiological Data in a Virtual Reality Study
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Recent pandemic related events have effectively put a stop to most in-lab data collection which has a profound negative impact on many research fields. Online and remote data collection, without the need to travel to a laboratory, starts to be used as a valuable alternative in some scenarios. This approach does not only help to resume some research activities, it also has an enormous potential to change how research is conducted in future. With the use of our biometric sensing system for Virtual Reality (emteqGO), we designed a VR experience autonomously guiding participants through the study. The combination of hardware posted to participants, alongside software solutions handling the setup, data collection, quality assurance and upload for immediate access enables a fully remote, unsupervised approach to data collection. While this approach might be the only feasible solution for some researchers, it has also laid the groundwork for possible future direction of research where remote data collection is a new way to enhance access to participants who typically would not travel to the laboratories. In designing these solutions, we found that for unsupervised remote data collection to work effectively, setup procedures must be easy to follow to obtain high quality data and the entire process must be highly robust, reliable, and built with a high degree of redundancy. Post-pandemic, there are many benefits of an ongoing use of remote research paradigms. These include ameliorating the diversity problem afflicting current research by widening the participant pool, improved research quality by collecting data in more naturalistic environments, and improving protocol standardisation using virtual reality. CCS CONCEPTS • hardware~communication hardware, interfaces and storage~sensor devices and platforms • hardware~emerging technologies~analysis and design of emerging devices and systems~emerging tools and methodologies • Human-centered computing~Human computer interaction (HCI)~Interaction paradigms~virtual reality
The imminent introduction of highly immersive technologies for entertainment that bring exciting possibilities for the users also raises important questions regarding the impact on their well-being. Game Transfer Phenomena (GTP), a research approach focusing on understanding the psychosocial effects of video game playing by examining non-volitional phenomena (e.g., altered sensorial perceptions, automatic mental processes, involuntary motoric activations and behaviours related to playing video games), suggests similarities between gamers’ experiences reported after playing on conventional devices and side effects of highly immersive technologies (e.g., head-up mounted displays, highly realistic virtual environments). The aim of this paper is to discuss the challenges highly immersive technologies posit to the malleable human mind, taking into account not only the side-effects of the virtual immersion manifesting as physical symptoms, but also the psychosocial implications.
3D Virtual Worlds as a Fusion of Immersing, Visualizing, Recording, and Replaying Technologies
Intelligent Systems Reference Library, 2015
This chapter discusses 3D virtual worlds as a fusion of technologies for serious applications. A variety of new trends in the area is considered along with original findings, exemplified with particular approaches and features designed. The goal of this chapter is to evaluate and envisage what benefits can be acquired if such trends and features are fused under a single platform. Specific trends considered in this chapter include increase of the sense of immersion with virtual reality devices, simplification of control with joysticks and mobile devices, working with large amounts of multimedia content, and capturing activities using virtual recording. The discussion is supported with the literature review and evaluation of the features developed for vAcademia virtual world. A particular focus of the chapter is on the discussion of how the new properties of 3D virtual worlds can increase their efficiency for serious applications, enable new scenarios of use, and improve user experience. . There has been extensive study of the impact of 3D immersive visualization on user behavior, lower-level task performance, and comprehension of data. A key characteristic, arguably the one that motivates the use of immersive VR in high-value training, is that participants tend to react as if the sce-ne they were seeing were real. That is they behave in a way that is similar to their behavior in a comparable real situation .
Embodied information behavior, mixed reality and big data
The Engineering Reality of Virtual Reality 2015, 2015
ABSTRACT A renaissance in the development of virtual (VR), augmented (AR), and mixed reality (MR) technologies with a focus on consumer and industrial applications is underway. As data becomes ubiquitous in our lives, a need arises to revisit the role of our bodies, explicitly in relation to data or information. Our observation is that VR/AR/MR technology development is a vision of the future framed in terms of promissory narratives. These narratives develop alongside the underlying enabling technologies and create new use contexts for virtual experiences. It is a vision rooted in the combination of responsive, interactive, dynamic, sharable data streams, and augmentation of the physical senses for capabilities beyond those normally humanly possible. In parallel to the varied definitions of information and approaches to elucidating information behavior, a myriad of definitions and methods of measuring and understanding presence in virtual experiences exist. These and other ideas will be tested by designers, developers and technology adopters as the broader ecology of head-worn devices for virtual experiences evolves in order to reap the full potential and benefits of these emerging technologies.