Conceptualizing and Designing a Virtual Reality Authoring Tool for Human-Robot Interaction Studies - Learnings and Guidance from Expert Interviews

Conducting Virtual Reality (VR) studies in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) offers substantial benefits. Researchers use VR as a versatile research instrument, providing a controlled and reproducible study environment while enabling less invasive, continuous, and more valid data generation through measurement methods like motion capture and eye-tracking. Despite its potential, technical complexities and resource-intensive VR application development pose barriers to researchers, which may prevent them from using the advantages of VR for their own research. Our vision is to address this challenge by creating an intuitive VR authoring tool that facilitates the creation and execution of HRI study designs, considering that different disciplines may have varying requirements for studies. To enable broad usability of such a tool, we conducted expert interviews with seven HRI researchers, gathering insights into perceptions, opportunities, and risks associated with VR, and subsequently derived a catalog of requirements for the authoring tool. We evaluated the mockups resulting from these interviews at an international robotics conference with 22 experts, aiming to collaboratively develop a suitable authoring tool within the HRI community.