Understanding How Visual Appearance in VR Affects Human Behaviour

Description

In Human-Computer Interaction research, evaluation is used to understand the strengths and weaknesses of novel user interface concepts and their implementations. The objective of this thesis is to understand the research questions that can be answered using Virtual Reality. The advent of Virtual Reality provides us with an opportunity to transfer parts of the research until now being conducted in the field to the lab. With this goal in mind, we aim to understand how human behaviour is affected by various factors in Virtual Reality. Our objective is to gain an insight on how the visual appearance (for example: design of the room, certain appearance of objects, etc) of the fully immersive environment affect how humans behave in a certain context and how (visual) manipulations of the VR user's context influence behavior.

The task of the successful application is to review previous work and subsequently investigate one application area in more detail. Possible areas are automotive interfaces, large public displays or appliances for smart homes. The work includes a detailed analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the approach.

Tasks

• Comprehensive survey of related work
• Review of relevant research questions in the application area
• Running a comparative user study (both in Real and Virtual World)
• Analysis, reflection and discussion of the outcomes

Requirements

• Independent scientific work and creative problem solving
• Interest in performing user studies and experiments
• Interest in VR
• Nice to have: Experience with 3D modelling and programming with Unity