The objective of this project is to design and produce concepts, methods and models for the study of user experience in virtual reality through a hybrid of qualitative and quantitative approaches, in particular through the coupling of first and third person methods.
A possible application of this research work could be the enrichment of diagnostic assistance in psychiatry thanks to virtual reality technologies and the development of objective indicators based on the analysis of the patient’s experience.
Winner of the 2018 call for research projects
Laboratories involved :
- LS2N (University of Nantes)
- SPHERE (INSERM, University of Nantes)
HOMERIC has received support from RFI OIC (Pays de la Loire) for a post-doctoral study for twelve months. Co-funders: University of Nantes, CHU de Nantes, LS2N and SPHERE laboratories.
About the project
The project intersects two fields: human-computer interaction (HCI) and quality of experience (QoE). Each of these fields studies user experiences of digital artefacts in specific contexts, leading to the development of distinct concepts and a specific state of the art.
The fields of HCI, QoE and Virtual Reality have developed their own specific tools and methods to assess the user experience. However, when considering interaction as such, these tools have their limitations, especially in view of the fact that user experience is often assessed after the event, in a very general way, and reduced to an average observer. To move beyond these limitations it is necessary to consider the temporalized lived experience, which can be studied by looking at system logs, the user’s physiological/behavioural data, interviews focusing on specific moments of the experience, etc.
There are two strands to the project :
- an interdisciplinary working group researchers specialising in the interaction between humans and machines, quality of experience, psychology and psychiatry, and data processing and analysis, will measure and model user experience;
- supervision of a post-doctoral thesis on the notion of affordance and salience in modelling the experience of interaction in the field of health and psychopathological assessment.
Methodology
- Combined qualitative and quantitative methods to study the user experience through the notion of affordance. In particular, the study will focus on the links between the deployment of visual attention and user behaviour on the one hand and on accounts of the temporalized subjective experience, through explanatory interviews.
- Characterisation of the interactive system (content, mechanisms for feedback and interaction) focusing on perceptual quality and the salience of affordance, in order to facilitate the design of experiments in virtual reality, and the modelling and even prediction of the user experience.
Schedule
Duration: 24 months, from 01/12/2018 to 30/11/2020
Prospects
- National and European research and innovation projects on hybrid methods for collecting data on and modelling experience
- Transfer of tools and methods to the Halle 6 Ouest Userlab (University of Nantes)
- Collaboration with public and private partners, in particular through CIFRE theses
Contacts
Toinon Vigier – Lecturer in computer science at LS2N, University of Nantes toinon.vigier@univ-nantes.fr
Yannick Prié – Professor of computer science at LS2N, University of Nantes yannick.prie@univ-nantes.fr