Virtual Environments for Human Centric Research

Abstract

Conducting field studies for human centric research often demands a significant amount of time and effort. Virtual Environments (VE) can be a potential alternative to reduce such requirements and help scale the field studies. However, we may experience a performance difference between (1) a virtual trial, and (2) a field trial of the same study. To learn under what circumstances a VE can successfully replace a field study and when it fails, this thesis describes a route-following experiment that compares the participants' performance between a simple VE and a field setup. The experiment results unveil that there is a significant difference in performance between a physical and a virtual setup for more challenging navigational tasks, whereas no significant difference is observed for simpler tasks. This finding encourages us to replace a less challenging field study with a simple VE, and explore the possibilities for a complex one.