Generative Research in the Context of Academic Extended Reality Research

As user experience (UX) research has become more formalized in industry research settings, discrepancies in approach and jargon have arisen between industry and academic research, particularly in the field of extended reality (XR). To begin elucidating some of these discrepancies, we conducted a brief investigation into aca-demic XR's acknowledgment of generative research, a type of user research that is exploratory and focuses on understanding users and the problems they face. For our investigation, we searched the digital catalogs of three XR conferences - IEEE ISMAR, IEEE VR, and ACM VRST - with two types of queries: 1) keywords based on generative research and its various names and 2) keywords representing research methods that are often associated with the generative research phase. The results of our searches revealed that the jargon of generative research is rarely explicitly used and that certain generative research methods are under-used by the academic XR community. Based on these results, we recommend that future academic XR researchers explicitly acknowledge the generative research stage. Currently, it is unclear to what degree users of XR are included at various stages of the academic XR user research process. We also recommend that academic XR researchers consider the application of the currently under-utilized research methods. By acknowledging generative research explicitly in the human-centered design process and considering new research methods, we suggest that academic XR researchers may be able to uncover hidden and/or “new” problems related to XR use that may have been otherwise difficult to identify.