CAVE

Cave Automatic Virtual Environments are immersive room-sized Virtual Reality, and have many applications such as digital tourism, academic research, and data visualization. The Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3) at Qualcomm Institute/Calit2 implemented CAVEs in museums to provide the general public access to cultural heritage. Since the CAVE controllers had never been tested, I led a research initiative to usability test three existing handheld controllers to concept a controller intuitive enough suitable for the museum goer’s first-time use. Our findings were published at the Euromed Cultural Heritage Conference (2014), where I advocated the importance of user-centered design in cultural heritage installments.

My Contributions
  • Recruited a team of designers and researchers
  • Researched controller types and VR best practices
  • Defined user types and conducted user interviews
  • Analyzed research data and communicated insights
Strategy

I recruited a team to interview experts within the lab and first-time CAVE users, and incorporated a lean version of contextual inquiry due to our short timeline:

  1. Define Focus
  2. Identify Users
  3. Consult Developers
  4. Contextual Inquiry
  5. Interpretation Sessions
  6. Competitive Audit
  7. Affinity Diagram
  8. Heuristic Analysis
  9. Findings
Controllers

CISA3 implemented three types of controllers in their CAVEs: the Flystick2, P2900, and Gyromouse. We usability tested these three, and conducted a competitive analysis on controllers that were not implemented, such as the Wii Mote.

Pictured from left to right: Flystick2, P2900, and Gyromouse

Contextual Interviews

In our sixteen contextual interviews, I observed user interactions, interruptions, and problems encountered in each CAVE. I asked users to think out loud so their mental models could be explored. Eleven first-time users, ages 18-23 years, revealed fundamental design flaws through problems they encountered, while five users with 1-20 years of CAVE expertise revealed problems that recurred despite experience level. After data collection, I moderated interpretation sessions where we highlighted interesting user activity and usability problems from the interviews.

Findings

We then created an affinity diagram to categorize our qualitative data, and identify overarching issues that caused the majority of user problems.

Common usability problems for first-time and expert users

Based on the usability problems we discovered, I provided the following recommendations to improve the ergonomics, simplicity, and visibility of the GyroMouse because it was the least expensive and most favored by both novices and experts:

Ergonomics

Implement grooves to provide comfort, stability, and give affordance on how the controller is meant to be held. This implementation alleviates recurrent problems such as strained hands, accidental dropping, and incorrect hand placement. Move the nested scroll wheel farther down the controller’s body to reduce strain and fatigue caused by overextending the thumb. Decrease the size of the body and thumb-central button array so the holding position closely mimics the hand at rest.

Simplicity

Remove the GyroMouse’s unprogrammed buttons, such as the trigger and three buttons below the left and right clicks, because they cause considerable confusion and unnecessary memory load.

Visibility

To remedy users from forgetting which controls are enabled in each environment, backlight enabled buttons to visually indicate available options. In congruence with Nielsen’s heuristics, improved visibility minimizes the user’s cognitive load and provides context for navigation.