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Idea generation processes are important for companies to develop new products and services, and brainstorming is a popular method for generating ideas in groups. However, it has been shown that negative group effects can occur during brainstorming sessions, especially since teams today often collaborate from different locations. Therefore, electronic brainstorming systems are needed that foster creativity while reducing negative group effects. We extend the research on electronic brainstorming systems by investigating how virtual reality affordances and constraints influence the occurrence of negative group effects in virtual reality brainstorming sessions. We conduct a qualitative study with 18 participants consisting of virtual reality brainstorming sessions and subsequent interviews. Using the affordance network approach, we explain the occurrence of production blocking and evaluation apprehension. Furthermore, we suggest extending this approach by incorporating constraintoutcome units and discuss whether the notion of affordance actualization can be transferred to constraints.

During crisis situations, emergency operators require fast information access to achieve situation awareness and make the best possible decisions. Augmented reality could be used to visualize the wealth of user-generated content available on social media and enable context-adaptive functions for emergency operators. Although emergency operators agree that social media analytics will be important for their future work, it poses a challenge to filter and visualize large amounts of social media data. We conducted a goal-directed task analysis to identify the situation awareness requirements of emergency operators. By collecting tweets during two storms in Germany we evaluated the usefulness of Twitter data for achieving situation awareness and conducted interviews with emergency operators to derive filter strategies for social media data. We synthesized the results by discussing how the unique interface of augmented reality can be used to integrate social media data into emergency control rooms for situation awareness support.

Benefits and applications of virtual reality (VR) in higher education have seen much interest both from research and industry. While several immersive VR applications for higher education have been described, a structured analysis of such applications on the market does not exist. We use design elements from research for applying VR in higher education to analyze available VR apps. The analyzed VR applications were acquired from pertinent online stores to capture the market's state. We analyze the current picture of the available apps by categorizing them based on design elements and learning content. The aims are to map what types of apps are available, to study what expected types cannot (yet) be found, to compare the current state of the literature and the educational VR app market, as well as to scrutinize the most frequently used design elements for VR in education.

ZusammenfassungDurch technologische Fortschritte in den letzten Jahren ist Virtual Reality erschwinglicher und benutzerfreundlicher geworden, sodass Unternehmen die Einführung der Technologie verstärkt in Betracht ziehen. Ihren Aufschwung erlebte die Technologie jedoch durch die Unterhaltungs- und Spieleindustrie, weshalb sich für Unternehmen die Frage nach sinnvollen Anwendungsfällen stellt. Nach der Affordance-Experimentation-Actualization-Theorie ist insbesondere bei neu aufkommenden Technologien eine Experimentierphase notwendig, um Handlungsmöglichkeiten aufzudecken und daraus Anwendungsfälle zu generieren. Dieser Artikel präsentiert die Ergebnisse einer Fallstudie in einem Unternehmen, das sich während der Studie in der Experimentierphase befand. Durch Interviews mit acht Beschäftigten und einem Vertriebspartner konnten drei Handlungsmöglichkeiten für Virtual Reality im Unternehmenskontext und eine zuvor nicht bekannte Aktivität der Experimentierphase identifiziert werden. Damit erweitert die Studie bisherige Forschung zur Experimentierphase und zeigt Unterschiede im Vergleich zu anderen innovativen Technologien auf, die in vorherigen Studien untersucht wurden. Für Unternehmen bietet die Studie wertvolle Einblicke in die erfolgreiche Gestaltung der Experimentierphase als Vorbereitung auf die Implementierung.

A growing number of people use social media to seek information or coordinate relief activities in times of crisis. Thus, social media is increasingly deployed by emergency agencies as well to reach more people in crisis situations. However, the large amount of available data on social media could also be used by emergency agencies to understand how they are perceived by the public and to improve their communication. In this study, we examined the Twitter communication about the German emergency agency "Johanniter-Unfall-Hilfe" by conducting a frequency, sentiment, social network and content analysis. The results reveal that a right-wing political cluster politically instrumentalised an incident related to this agency. Furthermore, some individuals used social media to express criticism. It can be concluded that the use of social media analytics in the daily routine of emergency management professionals can be beneficial for improving their social media communication strategy.

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