Extended Reality (XR) Remote Research: a Survey of Drawbacks and Opportunities

TL;DR

This survey explores the challenges and opportunities of conducting remote experiments using XR technology, highlighting both limitations like safety concerns and benefits such as enhanced data collection and reproducibility.

Contribution

The paper provides a comprehensive survey of XR researchers, identifying key limitations and opportunities for remote XR experiments, and proposes conceptualizing XR as an interactive data collection platform.

Findings

Participant recruitment remains a challenge in remote XR research.

XR hardware offers built-in data collection capabilities like gaze and hand tracking.

Portability and reproducibility are key advantages of remote XR experimentation.

Abstract

Extended Reality (XR) technology - such as virtual and augmented reality - is now widely used in Human Computer Interaction (HCI), social science and psychology experimentation. However, these experiments are predominantly deployed in-lab with a co-present researcher. Remote experiments, without co-present researchers, have not flourished, despite the success of remote approaches for non-XR investigations. This paper summarises findings from a 30-item survey of 46 XR researchers to understand perceived limitations and benefits of remote XR experimentation. Our thematic analysis identifies concerns common with non-XR remote research, such as participant recruitment, as well as XR-specific issues, including safety and hardware variability. We identify potential positive affordances of XR technology, including leveraging data collection functionalities builtin to HMDs (e.g. hand, gaze tracking) and the portability and reproducibility of an experimental setting. We suggest that XR technology could be conceptualised as an interactive technology and a capable data-collection device suited for remote experimentation.