Hello, this video is a very brief summary of the research in our paper, "Extended Reality
Remote Research: a survey of drawbacks and opportunities". I am Jack Ratcliffe, one of
the co authors of this paper along with Francesco Soave, Professor Nick Brynn-Kinns, Dr. Laurissa
Tokarchuk and Dr. Ildar Farkhatdinov. The rationale for this paper was there was a lack
of literature concerning conducting remote research with XR technologies. And that evolved
into this survey of drawbacks and opportunities. We got to 46 responses to our 30 item questionnaire
and then thematically analysed the responses from these respondents, and came up with six sub
themes around the drawbacks and opportunities in remote exile research. Now, we can't go
into full detail about these, but we can give a brief overview of them. For full details,
please read the paper. But the first of these themes was study subtypes. So we summarise
the types of experiments people were running and four study subtypes. One is in lab being
vital. So that's where you have bespoke hardware or controlled conditions are very important.
And on the other end of the continuum was remote fatal, which is where you want to ensure
that the participant is in the wild or in a naturalistic settings when they might engage
with the hardware or the exercise. Now between those there was also in lab preferred and
remote preferred being their preferred It was so that you wanted some kind of control
or you felt like it would be best if you were the researcher was there to be supportive,
and remote preferred was when they really wanted to take advantage of what they speculated
will have benefits of remote research such as wider participant reach and recruitment.
Which brings us to our second theme participants. So the majority of researchers felt that participation
in lab have typically quite small recruitment sizes, and then if they move to remote, there
could be a lot larger. But with that came questions about balance and who were these
remote participants? Is it a balanced sample size?
Does this have some kind of efficiency difference? Maybe it might be more efficient to run remote
studies? And how do you ensure that the correct participant requisites are checked when you
never actually meet these people. The third thing was beta correction.
A big concern about this was hardware in that a lot of people use bespoke or rare hardware
to collect data such as ecgs, or ETS, which are not available remotely to users. Not many
people have a brain scanning device at home. And typically, their VR experience is one
that is consumer grade, such as an Oculus quest, rather than, say, an HTC with eyetracking.
There are also questions about the process of data collection, how that could be stored,
and also how qualitative data can be picked up from observing a participant, which is
a lot more difficult when that participant is maybe doing the study asynchronously from
you. The fourth theme was experimentation questions. So things like being in a controlled
environment versus not being able to interact with participants what that leads to what
the setting affects, in the research, how hardware and software might have different
problems and solutions remotely and in lab. If the setting affects the research question
of the experiment, and potentially cost implications for remote and in lab studies. The fifth theme
was health and safety, which covered things like the protocols of in lab studies and out
of lab studies, how you can ensure health and safety measures are met, what the equipment
has to be, and how support can be given both in lab and remotely. The sixth and final theme
was ethics, which is we've quite well established in lab ethical procedures. But where does
the ethical response and understanding for the risk that we put remote researchers through
if Is there a responsibility issue that needs to be understood? So I'm just going to present
the sort of five key questions that we feel from all of these themes are still really
important for the XR researcher community to answer. The first is, how can we access
a large pool of remote xR participants? Because most people see this as the main game of remote
exit studies. The second is Who are these potential remote XR participants? And are
they representative? The third is so what extent do remote XR studies affect results
compared with in lab studies? The fourth is what are the built in XR data collection affordances
of XR hardware? And what can they help us study? How can we use the hardware that we
know people have and its affordances to ensure that experiments are useful and optimal? And
finally, five? How can we lower the barrier to creating encapsulated experimental software
to maximise the potential of XR research and by encapsulated software, we mean building
software where when people do remote research, it's all available the data collection and
the experimentation inside one piece of software which can then be shared as part of the paper
part of the report be used for reproducibility studies.
And even be iterated on by other researchers to enhance and develop research questions
much like literature and research in the field is.