New Approach to VR Research
By: Hangyu Li, Nathan Liu
Technology:
Microsoft is the world’s largest software company and provides a wide variety of services such as Office applications, Windows system computers, and Azure cloud computing services. With such a huge company, one would expect a team where new applications and innovations are made.
Microsoft Research, also known as MSR is exactly the team that improves or creates new innovations. The MSR was first founded in 1991 by Bill Gates, Richard Rashid, and Nathan Myhrvold to improve technological innovations to help solve world problems with the help of different expertise such as governmental, industrial, and academic researchers where they have over 1000 employees employed ranging from engineers, mathematicians, computer scientists, and physicists.
With the help of a variety of experts, Microsoft Research has many research areas that they focus on. In this article, we are diving deeper into the Intelligence section where some of their focus includes Artificial Intelligence, Audio & acoustics, Computer vision, Graphics & multimedia, Human-computer interaction, Human language technologies, and Search & information retrieval. However, we are mainly focusing on the human-computer interaction section of this research.
During the pandemic, the word we heard most frequently among many words was remote. There are a large number of people affected by Covid-19, which has led to the rapid development of remote (online tools) in recent years. The RemoteLab group proposed their idea and started their project based on how to provide VR researchers to conduct user studies online as they would have the same experience in-person. This will impact the VR searchers to have more options to do their research with other benefits that come with remote lab.
Research:
In the HCI (Human-computer interaction) research area, a group of researchers (Jaewook Lee, Raahul Natarrajan, Sebastian S. Rodriguez, Payod Panda, Eyal Ofek) have conducted research on virtual reality that can allow users to do lab work remotely called RemoteLab: Virtual Reality Remote Study ToolKit. It was published and organized by ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) on October 2022. The system was created using the Unity game engine which is available in the Unity Asset store. Anyone with a head-mounted display or VR headset is able to access the application provided by the researcher.
In terms of the purpose of the article, the researchers tend to conduct user studies by observing participants in person at their laboratory, where the participants will complete tasks by experiencing the VR equipment to measure their behaviors and capabilities (RemoteLab: A VR remote study toolkit — microsoft.com). However, it is getting much more difficult to conduct in-person user studies in recent years due to a few reasons: The covid-19 pandemic and affordable VR equipment. The researchers proposed a novel open-source Unity toolkit called RemoteLab. In a simpler explanation, the software is designed to provide a set of tools to have a better experience in terms of recording, collecting, and analyzing data (RemoteLab: A VR remote study toolkit — microsoft.com). It allows VR research to conduct experiments remotely when an in-person experiment is not feasible while gaining the same hands-on experience. It also increases the sampling variability of a target population (RemoteLab: A VR remote study toolkit — microsoft.com). An additional benefit of RemoteLab is that it is able to record and playback sessions of the lab work being done on VR. In most labs, mental memorization and note-taking are required to understand the reaction that is taking place. With recorded labs, it can allow users and students to refer back to the video to understand the procedures that are being done to get to the final product.
During the research, questionaries were also introduced for participating users as a way to get their initial reaction to the product. The questionnaires provide a wide variety of subjects concerning quality and accessibility ranging from workload, system usability, and motion sickness. It is also important to note that the questionnaires were administered virtually rather than physically because the switch would lead to biases since the point of this toolkit was to help users stay virtual due to the pandemic. The way that RemoteLab administered the questionnaires was displayed with either common or custom-made multiple-choice questions that show up one at a time so that it is more manageable for the participant to digest and change the question if they wanted to go back or forward to a different question. This also allows researchers to better understand what the users want to further improve the product.
First, the researcher and participants both need to set up their video conference tool, and make sure that they are in a good position under the camera and in a safe area to start the remote lab.
Last, the participant is required to finish a set of questionnaires before executing the experiment. After it got filled, the researcher will guide the participant and enter the virtual experiment environment. When the lab starts, the researcher will provide different tasks for the participant until the lab end.
Product:
We do consider the product successful because the remote toolkit facilitates how VR researchers can imitate in-person lab experiences with the use of VR to conduct a lab session virtually. The remote toolkit provides VR researchers with the opportunity to reach out to different sets of target audiences.
VR has become a popular device in the gaming community, however, it is not widely used in educational settings. The implementation of expanding the use of VR in education can be game-changing. In traditional lab settings, there are risks of exposure to harmful chemicals and other objects that can be dangerous, the use of the VR lab can remove the risks while keeping the experience and knowledge. This brings up another benefit of working in the lab remotely, which is the ability to go back to a certain point during the experiment to understand the procedure and take notes. In a physical setting, it is hard to take notes and rewind your memory. In the VR lab, the ability to record and playback to a certain point during the lab to see a reaction or know the procedure can further help students with their learning.
Reference:
RemoteLab: A VR Remote Study Toolkit — Microsoft.com. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2022/09/Lee_RemoteLab_UIST22.pdf.
