The use of extended reality (XR) technology - such as virtual, augmented, and mixed reality - has typically been studied in specialised research laboratories with co-present participants and researchers. When the COVID-19 pandemic rendered in-person research unsafe, XR researchers turned to the internet to source participants to complete user studies and experiments at a distance. This was already a common practice in fields such as human-computer interaction, however, there has been little published research on conducting remote XR user studies. Therefore, researchers had to develop and test their own methods for conducting XR research online resulting in many methodological questions being raised. For example, how to crowdsource participants with unique hardware requirements, such as head-mounted displays. Once participants are found, more questions arise, such as how to best provide instructions for remote studies, and how and even whether studies should be supervised when undertaken remotely. Unsupervised research brings with it more questions, such as how to confirm the validity of the data and ensure the study was completed as intended by the researcher. It also raises questions of how to determine what data should be removed from online samples due to inconsistencies in study execution, and how to ensure participants are being truthful.
As the trend toward remote work grows, it is likely that XR research will increasingly be conducted online. Additionally, the increasing popularity of commercial XR hardware at home and at work means that remote participants will become more and more accessible, and researchers will be able to reach larger and more diverse populations of participants. With this special issue of Frontiers in Virtual Reality, we will gather lessons learned and examples of remote XR research so that these experiences can be archived and shared with the community at large. This way, researchers developing remote XR studies will have access to the resources that we lacked at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This research topic focuses on all aspects of remote XR user research. We welcome submissions of original research and reviews on (but not limited to) the following topics:
• Defining remote XR user studies and research
• Participants for remote XR user research: who are they, are they representative, and how do we access them?
• Data collection: identifying drawbacks of remote XR user research and advantages from the data collection affordances built-in to XR hardware
• Encapsulated studies: how can we lower the barriers to creating encapsulated experiment software in which a user downloads software and participates in a study with no researcher oversight
• Addressing ethical issues of remote XR studies
• Remote XR user research in a post-pandemic world: what lessons can we learn from remote XR study, what route shall we choose for XR studies, on-site, online or blended?
• XR as a remote user research tool: beyond XR, what experience learn from remote XR research to guide remote research in other research areas e.g. Can XR be used as a tool to carry out remote HCI research
• Differences between remote AR, VR, and MR research
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Topic Coordinators: Jack Ratcliffe and Dr. Melynda Hoover
The Topic Editors and Frontiers's Editorial Office would like to thank Jack Ratcliffe and Dr. Melynda Hoover for their advisory and supporting roles in this Research Topic, and key contribution in initiating and preparing this project.