hi everyone this is Narges Ashtari.
I'm a PhD student at Simon Fraser University, and today I'm going to talk about creating
augmented reality and virtual reality applications: current challenges, practices, and opportunities.
So to start we all know that the augmented and virtual reality are going to be an integral
part of the near future technology and a many consumer-level AR and VR devices are emerging
in the market.
While AR and VR devices are getting cheaper and also easier to access, most of the people
involved in authoring AR and VR devices so far have been among professional developers
who are engaged mostly in industry level projects.
However, right now we can see that the door is getting open for many non-professionals
and they are increasingly tinkering with AR and VR applications.
As an example, we can see artists who are using augmented reality to make art installations.
We can also see teachers using AR and VR to enable themselves to convey complex ideas
in their classes.
We can also see architects who are using AR and VR to get a better sense of their design
via virtual physicalization.
So we can see right now that there is there is a rich body of research available in HCI
community about AR and VR creation and they are exploring different ways to ease the creation
process.
However, the problem that we have right now is that we know relatively little about non-professional
AR and VR creators' approach towards learning process and where they face barriers during
their design and development activities.
So in this study our focus was on understanding: What processes do non-professional AR and
VR creators currently use and how are they different from other kinds of interaction
design and development like mobile and web development?
In this study, we also wanted to understand what challenges do non-professional creators
face when working on AR and VR projects? so to answer these questions, we decided to
apply a qualitative approach by conducting semi-structured interviews with 21 non-professional
AR and VR creators.
After our data analysis and after getting the results of our study, three groups of
creators emerged.
The first group consisted eight user experience
and user interface designers, the second group included six domain experts who were mostly
researchers and subject matter experts, and the last group was made of seven hobbyists
who were not working on commercial scale projects and they described their projects as personal
projects or mostly gaming related ones.So in the paper we synthesized eight key barriers
described by our non-professional AR and VR creators which were ranging from understanding
the initial landscape of authoring tools, to designing and prototyping AR and VR
experiences, and to implementation, debugging, and user testing.
In this presentation, in particular I'm going to talk about three of the most interesting
key takeaways one by one.
So, to start we found that there was a lack of understanding around where to start and
what to even look for when beginning the AR and VR creation process.
So, to give you a quick look of what takes one to make an AR or a VR application, you
will need to first choose a head-mounted display from a wide variety of HMDs available right
now in the market and then, you need to prototype and often make a 3D model.
So, you need to select and learn a 3D modeling software.
Also, the frameworks in which you code require mastery in different
programming languages, and all these finally should be compatible with the computer you're
using.
Also, away from all these very initial issues, one of the key deficiencies reported was that
compared to other mediums like mobile development, AR and VR development lacked concrete design
guidelines and examples.
So, this problem in our study was found to be more acute for hobbyists and domain experts
as they mostly didn't have any intuition and experience in UX and UI design as an example,
one of our hobbyists commented on his struggles using UI assets provided by Unity telling
that: we didn't have any guidelines I mean they say in documentation you have some assets
in this unity package like standard buttons or standard windows, use them!but they didn't
say how to use them!so in here, we kind of saw how lack of intuition in UX and UI design
might have affected our hobbyists and domain experts but the interesting point that we
found was that, again the intuition wasn't really helpful for the UX designers as well
when they were handling situations like object selection, conditional actions, scene flows,
and movement between scenes.Secondly, in our study we observed that every stage in design
had its own user-centered design challenges for our creators.
So, an interesting observation from our study was that, most of our domain experts and hobbyists
didn't even know of the existence of prototyping and user testing step.
So, instead of the typical approach towards application creation, going to the research,
prototyping, implementation, and testing, they skipped the prototyping step, and jumped
right into the implementation, ignoring the testing step as well.
On the other hand, if you remember, we had UX designers and while UX designers were more
invested in proper prototyping and user testing processes, they also experienced some barriers.
So, according to our UX designers compared to designing for 2D applications, AR and VR
were very difficult because of the addition of many factors such as designing of user
posters for many different scenarios and at the same time, controlling their fatigue and
simulators' sickness.
Moreover, in 3D experiences there is a need for experience in sound
design to give a clue to the users to enable them to easily navigate the virtual spaces.
So, as a response and to get a better sense of a 3D prototype our UX designers came up
with the methods such as role-playing and 360 storyboarding.
However, these methods were reported to be open-ended and non representative of the real
virtual experiences, as they still could not be considered to be accurate
in visual aspects and also lighting and audio design.
So, moving forward another issue came up when UX designers attempted to test their applications
with UX methods they had already learned previously.
So, most of the participants in this group reported struggling with the testing in AR
and VR environment, and one of the key challenges in user testing was that the end users who
they worked with often did not have any intuition about using AR and VR equipment or any kind
of experience being in immersive environments.
As an example, one of the UX designers shared with us that: testing is one of the biggest
challenges especially if it's a new user.
They have problems to grasp that connections in their minds that what they touch he means
controllers is the equivalent of what they're seeing virtually.Lastly, even when creators
could get over some of the barriers in getting started, they faced another key challenge
in dealing with constant changes in AR and VR technologies and lack of relevant support.
People making AR and VR experiences right now are working in an environment where not
everyone has figured out what is possible for any particular devices.
Constant changes in hardware many times leaves creators behind and makes their creations
useless and unsupported.
one of our participants shared uncertainties going on telling that: You create an AR experience
for the Samsung and it doesn't work on any other Android phone and the client wants it
on multiple phones.
So, suddenly the team faces persistent changes.
So here based on what we learned through this study our hope for the future authoring tools
is to provide opportunities for creators to start easy while being able to do more complex
intractions within the same tool.
We also need to consider facilitating testing and debugging processes.
More importantly, in this study we learned that we need a much better understanding of
the user diversity among AR and VR creators.
There are many possibilities but we suggest looking at the subfield of end-user development
as a starting point.
End-user developers are non-professional developers who come from a wide variety of backgrounds
often other than computer science.
These people do not always have a clear plan for their development needs and have different
needs compared to industry professionals and we saw that most of the AR and VR creators
in our study fit this description.
Therefore, we have to consider what can HCI learn from successful practices applied for
supporting end-user development in other domains such as web and mobile development and how
can we apply them to AR and VR creation practices? so we hit to the end of this presentation.
Thanks for listening and please read our paper and feel free to reach out if you need to
discuss more or if you need to ask some questions!