On the use of virtual environments for the evaluation of location-based applications

Abstract

User experience (UX) research on pervasive technologies faces considerable challenges regarding today's mobile context-sensitive applications: evaluative field studies lack control, whereas lab studies miss the interaction with a dynamic context. This dilemma has inspired researchers to use virtual environments (VEs) to acquire control while offering the user a rich contextual experience. Although promising, these studies are mainly concerned with usability and the technical realization of their setup. Furthermore, previous setups leave room for improvement regarding the user's immersive experience. This paper contributes to this line of research by presenting a UX case study on mobile advertising with a novel CAVEsmartphone interface. We conducted two experiments in which we evaluated the intrusiveness of a mobile locationbased advertising app in a virtual supermarket. The results confirm our hypothesis that context-congruent ads lessen the experienced intrusiveness thereby demonstrating that our setup is capable of generating preliminary meaningful results with regards to UX. Furthermore, we share insights in conducting these studies.

Investigating the Effects of Location-Based Advertising in the Supermarket: Does Goal Congruence Trump Location Congruence?

“…While such an approach is certainly worthwhile and allows for a broad exploration of consumer experience, one can argue that it does not provide a sufficiently ecologically valid research context to derive accurate predictions of consumers' reactions to LBA. Talking about hypothetical location-congruent messages, after all, is vastly different from receiving LBA in real life (Hühn et al 2012). Xu and colleagues (2009) employed an experimental design to investigate the relative effectiveness of text versus multimedia messages in LBA.…”

“…It has been noted that advertising researchers have struggled with the evaluation of interactive and context-sensitive applications like LBA because of their lack of means to create an ecologically valid research setting (Hühn et al 2012). In the field of human-computer interaction (HCI), however, this has been a familiar challenge for some time, giving rise to a new line of research where lab studies have been extended with virtual environments (Hühn et al 2012).…”

“…In the field of human-computer interaction (HCI), however, this has been a familiar challenge for some time, giving rise to a new line of research where lab studies have been extended with virtual environments (Hühn et al 2012). This offers participants a dynamic and interactive context during their experience while researchers retain a controllable and malleable experimental setting (Leichtenstern André and Rehm 2010).…”

Utilizing Virtual Environments for the Evaluation of Lighting Controls

“…In the field of ubiquitous computing, where the context and environment play an important role, the use of virtual environments have been applied previously with promising results (Barton & Vijayaraghavan, 2002;Hühn, Khan, Lucero & Ketelaar, 2012;Leichtenstern, André & Rehm, 2010;Snowdon & Kray, 2009). The application domains varied from exploring the interface of a camera in a room (Barton & Vijayaraghavan, 2002), to evaluating location-based advertisement in a supermarket (Hühn et al, 2012), to researching whether users would apply different mobile interaction techniques in smart living rooms (Leichtenstern et al, 2009), to mobile navigation support for pedestrians in the countryside (Snowdon & Kray, 2009).…”

“…The application domains varied from exploring the interface of a camera in a room (Barton & Vijayaraghavan, 2002), to evaluating location-based advertisement in a supermarket (Hühn et al, 2012), to researching whether users would apply different mobile interaction techniques in smart living rooms (Leichtenstern et al, 2009), to mobile navigation support for pedestrians in the countryside (Snowdon & Kray, 2009). The variety of applications for virtual environments implies that there is a potential of using this technology for evaluating lighting UI applications.…”