Handbook for Evaluation Studies in Virtual Reality

Virtual reality (VR) applications are spreading and attract industries since VR technologies are becoming more affordable, powerful and robust. VR applications inherently call for human-computer interaction, which in turn calls for system and usability evaluations, typically through measurement of human behavior including aspects of perception, action, and task-performance. The evaluation issue calls for multi- and interdisciplinary research activities, where technical expertise is combined with humanistic knowledge and methodology. Several experts in the field of VR as well as in the field of usability studies call for helpful guidelines in order to be able to evaluate VR applications. This paper gives an overview of this problem and introduces a guideline which is supposed to assist researchers in evaluating VR applications. In particular, it aims at assisting those who are not experts in evaluation studies as well as students. The aim is also to facilitate multi-disciplinary activities through the use of an evaluation handbook which would be simple and focused on VR. The applicability of this guideline has been tested in two pilot studies, which showed how this handbook could successfully be employed to carry out pilot (and formal) evaluations.