A Qualitative Analysis of Interaction Techniques in a Virtual Reality Instruction Environment: Experiences From a Case Study

As they can immerse people into virtual worlds free from external distraction, virtual reality (VR) applications are an important factor in research today and can be useful in various scenarios such as intervention training, simulations and in learning environments. However, many people are not used to interacting and navigating in VR and may not have much prior technical experience, which can become a distracting factor to the content and can influence success negatively. Thus, benefits of VR-environments cannot be fully exploited. Aiming to counteract the problem that people cannot take advantage of the benefits of VR-applications, an instruction room for training representative interaction patterns, i.e. interaction and locomotion mechanics, was designed. Students (N = 12) were videotaped going through six stations of the instruction room with different interaction tasks. They were prompted to think aloud to capture their thoughts (e.g., intuitiveness, usability and expansion ideas) while interacting, and interviewed afterwards for an overall assessment. A qualitative content analysis helped to identify patterns. Interactions like localization field triggers for instructions and answering a quiz were regarded as highly intuitive, giving feedback with a drum keyboard was reported as most entertaining.