Establishment of Production Standards for Web-based Metaverse Content: Focusing on Accessibility and HCI

Abstract

Metaverse technology is expanding to industries in various fields, such as medical, national defense, and education, and training simulation programs have been mainstream so far. However, there have been increasing attempts to apply metaverse content to web-based platforms linked to social media services and, as a result, we face the problem of access to web-based metaverse content. Unlike traditional content, metaverse content interacts with many users, so content accessibility is the first important part to consider. In other words, to maximize the quality of metaverse content, it is essential to pull out the optimal UX through a detailed HCI (human computer interaction) design. Metaverse content development methodologies have effective methods proposed by many researchers. However, they are limited to web-based metaverse content that limits the use of high-end hardware. They are ineffective for platforms such as PCs and VR devices, as most studies focus on improving the visual performance of PCs or high-performance VR devices. Therefore, unlike existing research, the key theme of our research is to study optimized development standards that can be applied to web-based metaverse content and find out their effects through experiments. We created a development standard to be applied to a Web-based platform based on the existing metaverse content development methodology. Then, we redeveloped the VR content into the metaverse content and named them the VR build and the metaverse build. We had 25 people play virtual reality builds and metaverse builds simultaneously. Then, we measured the overall experience with an evaluation tool called the Game Experience Questionnaire (GEQ); the GEQ is a proven tool for evaluating content experiences by dividing them into positive/negative scales. When comparing the results measured from the two builds, the metaverse build showed consistent results with a higher positive scale, and a lower negative scale, than the VR build. The results showed that users indeed rated metaverse content positively. The bottom line is that the web-based metaverse content development standards that we have produced are practical. However, since generalization is limited, continuous research will be needed in more experimental groups in the future.