Web-Based VR Experiments Powered by the Crowd
This work addresses the need for replicable and low-cost VR experiments with diverse populations, though it is incremental in applying existing crowdsourcing techniques to VR.
The authors tackled the problem of conducting behavioral experiments in Virtual Reality (VR) by developing a method to recruit and validate participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk, enabling three crowdsourced VR experiments that reproduced VR illusions, showing feasibility with challenges like scale remaining.
We build on the increasing availability of Virtual Reality (VR) devices and Web technologies to conduct behavioral experiments in VR using crowdsourcing techniques. A new recruiting and validation method allows us to create a panel of eligible experiment participants recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk. Using this panel, we ran three different crowdsourced VR experiments, each reproducing one of three VR illusions: place illusion, embodiment illusion, and plausibility illusion. Our experience and worker feedback on these experiments show that conducting Web-based VR experiments using crowdsourcing is already feasible, though some challenges---including scale---remain. Such crowdsourced VR experiments on the Web have the potential to finally support replicable VR experiments with diverse populations at a low cost.