Virtual Reality
Initiation Research
Exploratory research documenting and observing initial human encounters with VR.
Summary
Participants who have had little to no contact with VR technology were invited to my home VR parlour (aka my living room) for a one-hour long session wherein they experienced virtual environments/applications using an HTC Vive head-mounted-display (HMD). Participants were introduced to the technology and space and then experienced 3 different VR applications.
- The Blu
- immersive virtual environment
- Beat Saber
- kinetic, embodied-interaction
- Google Tilt-Brush
- controller-based interaction, creating in virtual space
Participants spoke out-loud conveying their experience during the sessions, with occasional prompting from researchers/facilitators.
The Goals
To Observe and Document
...initial human encounters with VR technology and virtual space.
To Gain Insights
...onto the human relationships to virtual space and VR tech.
To Establish
... VR research best practices and protocols.
Abstract
This is not a test.
It is not targeting a solution.
It is not in regards to a problem.
How can we interrogate/explore the embodied experience between boundaries of the real/irreal? How do we explore VR technology through a lens outside of our previous (2-Dimensional) digital interactions?
When you look for something, you find the something.
When driving on the road, one is less likely to see a biker because they are looking for cars, not bicycles.
This becomes crucial to our research if we examine the way "looking for something" affects our visage as observers.
When you perform a usability test, you find usability opportunities/problems.
Our understanding of the VR experience is so underdeveloped that perhaps we don't even know what to target yet. In fact, it is imperative that the ways in which we research VR be radically different than the ways we've researched digital interactions in the past, because these experiences are radically different.
Walking around in the dark.
All that said, I do have goals. It is targeting something. I mean to intentionally allow and build space for the research to inform itself as it grows.
Like walking around in the dark.
