Hi everyone! My name is Veronika Krauß
and I am a research assistant and PhD student at University
of Siegen and Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg. The
presented work was done in collaboration with Alexander Boden,
Leif Oppermann, and René Reiners at Fraunhofer FIT and
Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg. We investigated the practices,
challenges, and workarounds of professional augmented
and virtual reality designers to learn more about their approaches
and potential implications for future development support.
Creating AR/VR applications still requires significant
technical skill and knowledge, and is therefore difficult
to be adopted. Current research in HCI is
focused on lowering the entry hurdles for non-technicians
by investigating authoring tools that require less to no
coding skills. However, little is known
about the situation for experienced professionals in this field.
For them, the fusion of multiple disciplines, skills,
motivations, and platforms results in a fragmented environment
of vocabulary, tools, methods, and approaches.
We contribute to the filed by providing empirical insights
in the authoring process of professional development teams
and highlight three main challenges for collaborative AR
and VR application creation.
Finally, we introduce design implications for tools
supporting such work by taking a practitioner-centered approach.
For our study, we followed a qualitative approach and
conducted semi-structured interviews using online video conferencing tools.
Our aim was to sample a diverse group of participants regarding
their background, application area, target
devices, and local distribution.
We finally recruited 26 participants with different
roles in the development process.
Based on their skillset, we grouped them as follows:
Creators with design skills, creators with
creators with coding skills, creators with both design
and coding skills, and managers.
All of our participants were actively working on
AR/VR application creation.
We designed our questions to investigate the full process
of developing an application - ranging from planning,
preparation, and execution to evaluation
and transfer.
We further asked about their tasks, tools,
methods, devices, challenges, and workarounds
in addition to their experience in classical 2D design and development.
For the analysis, we adopted an open coding approach.
In addition to the 3 key challenges which I am going to focus
on in the next slide, we also distilled 4 roles
based on the reported tasks and activities.
Details about those roles can be found in the paper.
AR/VR has a unique set of challenges for creators
due to the three-dimensionality and novelity of the medium.
Thre three key challenges we identified are as follows:
First, team-internal misconceptions about the medium.
Those originate from an overestimation of hardware and software
capabilities. The teams cope with that issue
by creating awareness about limitations during demonstration
and experience sessions. Hereby, they use artifacts
like working applications or mood boards.
Second, lack of tool support and appropriate methods.
This leads to the creation of inaccessible prototypes for designers
and developers with non-overlapping skill-sets,
but may also result in prototypes becoming the final products.
Teams approach this issue for instance by teaching each
others' tools or explaining concepts using diagrams,
sketches, wireframes, and sometimes physical prototypes.
Third, the absence of a common language.
This causes problems in describing system behavior and
design ideas. Reported workarounds
were joined prototyping sessions and the creation of interactive
artifacts, such as video clips and animations.
Based on our findings, we elicited five
implications for future methods and tools of which I want to highlight
the potential of drawing from already existing methods,
approaches, and workarounds.
Since AR/VR creation unifies several disciplines
and design approaches, it might be beneficial to try out
methods and tools from other disciplines, such as
filmography, architecture, and game design.
With this, we reach the end of my presentation.
Thank you very much for your attention and feel free to
reach out to me if you have questions that cannot be addressed
in the upcoming Q&A session.