PhD defence by Andreea-Anamaria Muresan

Title

Building Blocks of Future Interfaces Concept-Driven Interaction Design in Virtual Reality

Abstract

Concepts like embodiment, presence, and immersion can be used to generate novel virtual reality (VR) interaction models. Many recent VR works highlight their conceptual contribution and its concrete instantiation — the prototype —- by describing what the prototype may achieve in real-world scenarios. This thesis adopts
a conceptual lens of interaction design, considering concepts as the building blocks of novel, future interfaces and proposes design spaces as their default representation. Establishing a more principled way to represent novel interactions may help researchers situate their work and give a snapshot overview of interaction design. In turn, practitioners may use these design spaces as a real-world tool for design.

Chapter 2 combines several frameworks, tracing the historical context for concepts,
design spaces, and prototyping and presenting design spaces as an evolving conceptualization tool within Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).

Chapter 3 presents a research paper containing an analysis of 233 YouTube VR fail videos and develops the concept of fail as opportunities or as breakdowns. This research paper presents a classification of fails and their causes. Based on design implications, the paper sketches interactions meant to prevent fails or harness their positive implications.

Chapter 4 develops the traditional concept of feedforward for VR through theoretical grounding, prototyping, and an expert evaluation. The outcome of this research is a feedforward design space that embeds both practical and theoretical concerns and may serve as a tool for developers of tutorial and training VR applications of the future.

Chapter 5 presents a research work (pending peer review) that develops the concept of interacting through multiple avatars. This work develops a design space from brainstorming workshops where experts generated ideas for using this concept in the real world. This work also instantiates a prototype, which includes a user-friendly interface for recording interactions. This artifact may serve as an authoring tool, making VR tutorials and feedforward development more accessible for non-technical designers.

Chapter 6 takes the overarching conceptual perspective of these works and provides additional context for how to generate and structure ideas, how to build on existing concepts, and how to embed usefulness and derive practical guidelines from conceptdriven design through design-spacemaking.

Chapter 7 presents a critical reflection of this work and provides an avenue to develop the works presented within this thesis further.

Lastly, in Chapter 8, I summarize the findings of this thesis and present a set of implications derived from the discussion in previous chapters. This work highlights the path from theory to artifact and from artifact to theory as a design space-making process. This process, upon dutifully recorded, ultimately serves to systematize knowledge and inform the design of future interfaces.

Supervisors

Principal Supervisor Kasper Hornbæk

Assessment Committee

Professor Pernille Bjørn, DIKU
Professor Enrico Ruzkio, University of Ulm
Associate Professor Michael Nebeling, University of Michigan

Moderator: Associate Professor Joanna Emilia Bergström, DIKU

For an electronic copy of the thesis, please visit the PhD Programme page.