Towards Self-Guided Remote User Studies - Feasibility of Gesture Elicitation using Immersive Virtual Reality

Gesture Elicitation Studies (GES) are a widely used empirical method to develop gesture vocabularies, interaction models and methods for gesture-based systems in different contexts. While GES show great promise to identify user-defined gestures, there are inherent problems with current methods used for GES. Especially during the ongoing pandemic, it has been nearly impossible to conduct in-person, in-lab GES, while ensuring the safety and well-being of the participants, and complying with social distancing regulations. Further, with prevailing experiment designs, increasing the number of participants is time consuming, while in-lab environments also limit ecological validity. This study explores an intuitive way of conducting self-guided GES using immersive Virtual Reality (VR), utilizing its capability to simulate various contexts to enhance ecological validity. We present a methodology and a tool set that use an immersive VR environment to conduct ecologically valid GES (as a use case) while requiring minimal involvement by the investigator. We evaluate our method using the case of a smart home environment and measure participant acceptance and discuss opportunities and challenges involved in this method. We believe that this study will help HCI research to move forward with participatory design research, even when lab experiments are difficult to conduct.