Lessons Learnt from Expert-Centred Studies Exploring Opportunities and Challenges for Immersive Forensic Investigation

TL;DR

This paper reflects on the challenges, solutions, and requirements encountered during three years of expert-centred research on immersive forensic investigation, highlighting practical insights for future studies involving human experts.

Contribution

It provides a detailed account of the unique challenges and solutions in conducting expert-centred research in immersive forensic investigation, an area with limited prior exploration.

Findings

Identified key challenges in expert-centred immersive research

Proposed strategies to address ethical and recruitment issues

Shared practical lessons for future expert-centred studies

Abstract

Research studies involving human participants present challenges, including strict ethical considerations, participant recruitment, costs, and many human factors. While human-computer interaction researchers are familiar with these challenges and current solutions, expert-centred studies can be even more challenging in ways that researchers may not anticipate. This issue is particularly important as research grants are increasingly based on practical and real-world problems, which necessitate close collaboration with experts. In this paper, we reflect on and discuss the challenges, solutions, and specific requirements that arose during our expert-centred studies conducted over three years of a PhD study exploring immersive forensic investigation.