Mitigation strategies for participant non-attendance in VR remote collaborative experiments

Bovo, Riccardo and Giunchi, Daniele and Costanza, Enrico and Steed, Anthony and Heinis, Thomas (2022) Mitigation strategies for participant non-attendance in VR remote collaborative experiments. Frontiers in Computer Science, 4. ISSN 2624-9898

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Abstract

COVID-19 led to the temporary closure of many HCI research facilities disrupting many ongoing user studies. While some studies could easily move online, this has proven problematic for virtual reality (VR) studies. The main challenge of remote VR study is the recruitment of participants who have access to specialized hardware such as head-mounted displays. This challenge is exacerbated in collaborative VR studies, where multiple participants need to be available and remotely connect to the study simultaneously. We identify the latter as the worst-case scenario regarding resource wastage and frustration. Across two collaborative user studies, we identified the personal connection between the experimenter and the participant as a critical factor in reducing non-attendance. We compare three recruitment strategies that we have iteratively developed based on our recent experiences. We introduce a metric to quantify the cost for each recruitment strategy, and we show that our final strategy achieves the best metric score. Our work is valuable for HCI researchers recruiting participants for collaborative VR remote studies, but it can be easily extended to every remote experiment scenario.

Item Type: Article
Subjects: Opene Prints > Computer Science
Depositing User: Managing Editor
Date Deposited: 14 Feb 2023 07:39
Last Modified: 03 Jan 2024 06:44
URI: http://geographical.go2journals.com/id/eprint/440

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