Everyday Virtual and Augmented Reality

Due to emerging consumer hardware solutions, virtual and augmented reality technologies are gaining increasing relevance in everyday contexts, such as living rooms or office spaces. This raises various challenges such as getting immersed in small and cluttered spaces, integrating immersive tools into existing processes and workflows, as well as the involvement of highly heterogeneous user groups in VR and AR applications. The current chapter aims to introduce and characterise this emerging research field by identifying various challenges in terms of the development and investigation of everyday VR and AR systems. Therefore, we give an overview of everyday VR and AR, discuss challenges for the field that we deem central to the continued adoption and integration of VR and AR into the wider public, as well as provide an overview of current everyday VR and AR in various application contexts and discuss some things from a users’ perspective. We then review works from previous WEVR workshops, which were established as a platform for the exchange of everyday VR and AR research, to face the main challenges and provide possible solutions. Finally, we discuss the WEVR impact and point out future research avenues.

Virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) have the potential to change information work. The ability to modify the workers senses can transform everyday environments into a productive office, using portable head-mounted displays (HMDs) combined with conventional interaction devices, such as keyboards and tablets. While a stream of better, cheaper, and lighter HMDs has been introduced for consumers in recent years, there are still many challenges to be addressed to allow this vision to become reality. This chapter gives an overview of the state of the art in the field of extended reality for knowledge work in everyday environments, identifies challenges and proposes steps to address the open challenges.

Augmented reality (AR) has been used in a large variety of scenarios from assembly support over gaming to collaborative work. Teamwork is a specific type of collaborative work and emerges in numerous everyday contexts. It is characterized (in addition to other aspects) by specific needs in terms of time-related synchronization of team members to enable them to coordinate the team task. This is specifically relevant in situations where team members are spatially dispersed, such that direct communication (orally and visually) is not possible. These restrictions reduce task-related communication and coordination, which are key for successful teamwork. AR has the potential to enable coordination in spatially dispersed teamwork by enhancing each team members’ view with information of the current status of the team task and additional feedback if needed, all adapted to the specific needs of the team members. As a key element of AR, this digital information is registered to the team member’s individual perspective on the work object in question. This chapter will first give an introduction to collaborative work, teams, teamwork, and taskwork followed by a broad overview of existing AR-based team-supportive methods. We will first present a taxonomy for the development and implementation of AR-based support systems and give a short example on its usage in the context of a user-centered design followed by a review of the current research conducted by the authors of the chapter and a discussion of future work.

One element that affects 3D tracking performance in virtual reality (VR) systems is fluctuations in the signal, i.e., jitter, which occurs regardless of the sensor technology used. In real-life VR systems, positional and rotational jitter can be found in all tracked objects, including the headset, controllers, or other trackers. Previous work had identified that \({\pm }0.5^{\circ }\) rotational jitter negatively affects user performance for distal pointing. Yet, they also found that even using a second controller to reduce the “Heisenberg effect” introduced by the button press does not address the problem completely. Moreover, with jitter on the position of a virtual object, user performance significantly decreases with jitter above one fourth of the size of that virtual object. Still, users preferred to have positional jitter on a virtual target rather than rotational jitter on a VR controller. In this chapter, we extended the previous literature by conducting a user study on angular jitter with controllers held with two different grip styles and targets at two different depth distances. The results revealed that user performance decreases (already) with \({\pm }0.25^{\circ }\) additional jitter. Thus, we suggest that practitioners/developers who design 3D user interfaces, controllers, and interaction techniques for daily 3D VR usage should focus on reducing jitter. Decreasing jitter not only improves user performance but also decreases frustration, which improves the user experience.

Populations are becoming older in developed countries because of low birth rates and increased life expectancy. At the same time, sedentary lifestyles are the 4th mortality factor worldwide. Exergames have been shown to motivate players to get physically active by promoting fun and enjoyment while exercising. However, most exergames are not designed to produce recommended levels of exercise that elicit adequate physical responses in the aged population. Designing meaningful and enjoyable exergames for fitness training in older adults pose critical challenges in matching user’s needs and motivators with game elements and typically do not consider the usability and cost-effectiveness constraints of target end-users and institutions. Here, we present the conception and field validation of PEPE—a gaming platform with mixed reality components whose purpose is to fight a sedentary lifestyle by promoting active aging in elderly-care centers. We show that PEPE’s custom-made exergames can be successfully used by trainers for delivering sustained long-term training, with benefits in terms of efficiency, elicited physical activity, and perceived effort. Also, PEPE improved the overall perception of the quality of life and social relations in institutionalized older adults.

Networked virtual reality is gaining recognition as a way to conduct remote classes or meetings when in-person meetings are difficult or risky. This chapter summarizes our ongoing work to develop and assess VR techniques for remote education. We first present two case studies of remote teaching in VR: a classroom-embedded virtual field trip of an energy center guided by a remote teacher, and a remote university class conducted for several weeks in a social VR tool. We then summarize our ongoing research to enhance remote educational VR interfaces using enhanced sensing, for example, to visualize or detect student attention based on eye-tracked gaze. Finally, we identify several practical considerations that will need to be addressed for the long-term success of educational deployments of virtual reality. This can help educators, researchers, and VR developers make informed decisions about how to best use VR technology for designing and deploying educational VR in everyday contexts such as schools and homes.

The rapid growth of extended reality (XR) technologies, such as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality (MR), provides avenues to turn market place into a highly innovative way of commerce. However, understanding customer’s demands, combined with scarce examples on successful marketing in virtual reality, opens a knowledge gap. To close this gap, the current chapter enrols auditing of literature from the perspective of consumer needs and market demands. Combining theoretical insights with different AR/VR technologies and their real market applications, we suggest a framework on how to augment experience, encompassing processing from attention to action. The conceptual framework could be implemented in development of appropriate high-tech AR/VR environments, providing appealing multisensory experience, and thus, enriching the brand portfolio with innovation going beyond traditional marketing practices.

There is a growing research interest concerning the use of VR as a medium in which to stage experimental evaluations. However, it is still unclear whether conventional usability evaluation methods can be directly applied to virtual reality evaluations and whether they will lead to similar insights when compared to the results of conventional usability real-world laboratory studies. Furthermore, the impact of graphic and interaction fidelity of the virtual prototype on the evaluation result is largely unexplored. Hence, we conducted two user studies with 44 participants. Results in the first study show that 61% of the reported usability problems were shared by both versions, highlighting the potential of Immersive Virtual Reality Evaluations (IVREs) as a method to evaluate early design concepts before committing to a physical prototype. In the second study, we found that usability issues related to the manual operation of the interactive device might not be identified if the interaction is implemented via supernatural techniques. In terms of graphical implications, designers should focus on those visual elements that communicate information to users. We discuss these implications and provide guidelines for deploying IVREs.