Enhancing Evaluation of Room Scale VR Studies to POI Visualizations in Minimaps

Abstract

Understanding and evaluating user behavior in virtual reality environments is challenging for researchers. Stereoscopic perception is highly dependent on the point of view, so it is necessary to account for multiple spatial positions. Robust tools and methods to analyze these spatio-temporal data are lacking. We propose a design solution for spatio-temporal data visualization for room-scale VR studies. Our result is a top-down minimap that plots 3D point of interest coordinates of room-scale virtual reality environments to a 2D visualization. The video stream from the head mount display is next to the minimap showing the top-down view of the scene, reflecting the visual stimuli that were perceivable by the user. Both views are linked such that replaying the user session is synchronized in time. The minimap enables researchers to review and replay the recorded user session for in-depth study, allowing them to gain insightful information about users' behavior in virtual environments.