Evaluation of VIA-VR 3D Environment Editor

Assigned Human-Computer Interaction Games Engineering Bachelor Master Project Thesis Games Research Lab

Background

VIA-VR is a VR-authoring tool for modeling and staging strongly engaging VR adventures for medical training, prevention, therapy, and rehabilitation. The VIA-VR Editor is a sophisticated 3D editor that can be used to compose virtual environments easily. It comprises features such as editing existing environments, drag-and-drop assets from various repositories such as Sketchfab, composition tools, contextual asset recommendations, and exporting the environment to a VR scene. The editor is designed to allow people with no prior technical knowledge to create their own VR environment. In particular, we want to target medical professionals as the end-user group. A first usable version of this editor already exists.

Tasks

This work is mainly intended to evaluate the usability/user experience when interacting with the editor. Based on the findings here, the requirements for the editor should then be revised.

The student is supposed to get familir with the editor, and evaluate the following with potential end users.

1. Evaluate the software usability (UIUX) of the VIA-VR Editor
2. Evaluate the hardware usability (Laptop)
3. Evaluate the features (working with templates, 3D assets, composition, recommendation engine, exporting scene etc)
4. Derive what needs to be chaged with respect to UIUX.
5. Examine and revise the type of recommendations that has to be provided to the user.
6. Review and suggest changes to be made in the workflow.

In the course of the project, tasks can of course be adjusted. Of course, there is always the possibility for students to contribute their own ideas.

Contact Persons at the University Würzburg

References

1. Andreas Halbig, Sooraj K. Babu, Shirin Gatter, Marc Erich Latoschik, Kirsten Brukamp, Sebastian von Mammen, Opportunities and Challenges of Virtual Reality in Healthcare – A Domain Experts Inquiry, In Frontiers in Virtual Reality, Vol. 3. 2022. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frvir.2022.837616/full