Hi everyone.
My name is Emily, and this is Andreea.
We're going to talk about our work analysing videos of VR Fails on YouTube.
We did this work with our co-authors, Kasper and Jarrod.
As virtual reality grows in popularity, we are seeing the rise of
community content showcasing its use.
In contrast to research lab which are easy to control with specific
furniture or layout, domestic and public spaces are messy, busy, and dynamic.
YouTube is rife with videos of players interacting with VR in
household and community spaces.
We see people colliding with furniture, falling over, hitting spectators and
experiencing fear, surprise, joy and more.
We watched many of these videos to better understand the
phenomenon surrounding VR fails.
Specifically, we were interested in thinking about VR fails
from two perspectives.
First we consider VR fails as breakdowns, which are moments of
stark disruption in the experience.
In this case, fails indicate usability problems, causing users to
express surprise or uncertainty of how to engage with the technology.
From this perspective, we aim to identify how we might design to avoid fails
and solve these usability problems.
On the other hand, we think about VR fails as seamful design, suggesting
that fails are not just problematic, but rather they provide insights into the
motivation and enjoyment of VR use.
We analysed 233 of these videos to identify themes around how people
fail and what causes these fails.
We identified six types of fails.
You can see them here together with the percentages of the occurrences.
In our dataset, we saw people making excessive reactions,
falling over, hitting with hands colliding, covering and other types.
The most common type of fail that we saw was excessive reaction.
These often involved users flailing around or screaming, often being caused
by sensorimotor mismatch or fear.
Notably, it is typically the spectators that experienced
excessive reaction as fails.
For the players, they form a natural part of the interaction.
Many of the actions observed here fall outside of the game design, but they can
still be considered expected behaviors.
Moving to the causes of these fails, we found seven causes.
We observed that these fails were most commonly due to fear, followed
by sensorimotor mismatch, obstacles in the real-world, crowd participation,
false signifiers, set up failures and in some cases, no cause.
One of the most common causes of fails is sensorimotor mismatch.
In this case, sensory information, primarily visual and proprioceptive
doesn't match the player's movement.
The mismatch can be due to latency or visual only feedback.
This cause often appears for users playing rollercoaster games, which
usually ends up in players falling over or showing excessive reactions.
Having examined these fails as both breakdown and seamful design, we discussed
new design opportunity they inspired.
As breakdowns, some of these fails can be pretty dangerous, causing
harm to spectators and players alike.
We saw so many videos of spectators being hit by players.
Recent work in HCI has explored sharing the view with spectators,
through head mounted projectors.
To reduce the risk of hitting fails, we suggest using these projections
to notify onlookers about the players' next likely movements.
This might let the spectators avoid collision with the players
or arrange the physical environment to prevent the players from
hitting and damaging the furniture.
As seamful design, VR fails can reveal new interaction opportunities.
We see players perform actions like curling or covering by
instinct and suggest adding these actions as controls in VR.
For example, peek through mode could allow players to disable the
display by covering their face, only partially revealing the view as they
peer through with their fingers.
Our paper reveals our analysis, insights and design ideas in detail.
Thank you for watching.