Exploring Different Participant-EvaluatorCommunication Methods in VR User Studies

Abstract Recent studies in Virtual Reality highlighted the importance of avoiding Breaks inPresence that occur when experiment participants alternate between the virtualand physical environment to fill in questionnaires or interact with the evaluator.In this paper, we report on a within-groups experiment comparing threemeans of communication between the evaluator and the immersed participantsin user studies in VR: Voice-Speaker, Video-Screen, and a 3D-Avatar. Immersedparticipants (N=38) completed three sets of tasks and were observed and theninterviewed through these three methods successively. Our findings reveal nosignificant difference in user performance between the methods. There were, however,significant differences in how they were perceived by the participants, withVideo-Screen, considered the most effective communication method. In contrast,the 3D-Avatar was the most “fun” and the users’ “favorite”, along with the Video-Screen. The Voice-Speaker was thought to be the least distracting yet impersonal,and least favorite.