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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.