Extended Reality (XR) Remote Research: a Survey of Drawbacks and Opportunities
This addresses the challenge of enabling remote XR research for HCI and social science fields, but it is incremental as it synthesizes existing perceptions rather than proposing new solutions.
The paper surveyed 46 XR researchers to identify limitations and benefits of remote XR experimentation, finding common issues like participant recruitment and XR-specific concerns such as safety, while highlighting positive affordances like built-in data collection and reproducibility.
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.