No abstract

Remote user studies—those where the experimenter and participant are not physically located together—offer challenges and opportunities in HCI research in general, and extended reality (XR) research specifically. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced this form of research to overcome a long period of unprecedented circumstances. However, this experience has produced a lot of lessons learned that should be shared. We propose guidelines based on findings from a set of six remote virtual reality studies, by analyzing participants' and researchers' feedback. These studies ranged from one-session types to longitudinal ones and spanned a variety of subjects such as cybersickness, selection tasks, and visual search. In this paper, we offer a big-picture summary of how we conducted these studies, our research design considerations, our findings in these case studies, and what worked well and what did not in different scenarios. Additionally, we propose a taxonomy for devising such studies in a systematic and easy-to-follow manner. We argue that the XR community should move from theoretical proposals and thought pieces to testing and sharing practical data-informed proposals and guidelines.

We present a method to track a smartphone in VR using a fiducial marker displayed on the screen. Using WebRTC transmission protocol, we capture input on the smartphone touchscreen as well as the screen contents, copying them to a virtual representation in VR. We present two Fitts' law experiments assessing the performance of selecting targets displayed on the virtual smartphone screen using this method. The first compares direct vs. indirect input (i.e., virtual smartphone co-located with the physical smartphone, or not), and reveals there is no significant difference in performance due to input indirection. The second experiment assesses the influence of input scaling, i.e., decoupling the virtual cursor from the actual finger position on the smartphone screen so as to provide a larger virtual tactile surface. Results indicate a small effect for extreme scale factors. We discuss implications for the use of smartphones as input devices in VR.