Usability in Virtual and Augmented Environments: A qualitative study

Abstract

Virtual and Augmented reality are developing rapidly: there is a multitude of environments and experiments in several laboratories using from simple HMD visualization to more complex and expensive 6-wall projection, CAVEs, and other systems. Still there is not yet a clear emerging technology in this area, nor commercial applications based on this technology are used in large scale. In addition to the fact that this is an emerging and relatively recent technology, there is little work to validate the utility and usability of these Virtual and Augmented environments when compared with traditional desktops. However, usability evaluation is crucial in order to design better systems that respond to the users' needs, as well as for finding applications that can really gain from the use of these new technologies. In this short paper, we present a preliminary qualitative usability study of a Virtual and Augmented Reality environment under development at the University of Aveiro. The main goal is to find clues on how to develop better evaluation methods for systems based on AR/VR technologies.