Field studies on public displays can be difficult, expensive, andtime-consuming. We investigate the feasibility of using virtualreality (VR) as a test-bed to evaluate deployments of publicdisplays. Specifically, we investigate whether results from virtual field studies, conducted in a virtual public space, wouldmatch the results from a corresponding real-world setting. Wereport on two empirical user studies where we compared audience behavior around a virtual public display in the virtualworld to audience behavior around a real public display. Wefound that virtual field studies can be a powerful research tool,as in both studies we observed largely similar behavior between the settings. We discuss the opportunities, challenges,and limitations of using virtual reality to conduct field studies,and provide lessons learned from our work that can help researchers decide whether to employ VR in their research andwhat factors to account for if doing so.

Ville Mäkelä, Rivu Radiah, Saleh Alsherif, Mohamed Khamis, Chong Xiao, Lisa Borchert, Albrecht Schmidt und Florian Alt.Virtual Field Studies: Conducting Studies on PublicDisplays in Virtual Reality.In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. CHI '20. ACM, New York, NY, USA.[Download Bibtex][Video]