Heuristic Evaluation for Virtual Reality Systems

Abstract

The advent of Virtual Reality (VR) has created new user-interaction paradigms that VR designers need to attend to in order to avoid usability issues. Currently, there are few formal methods for evaluating the usability of VR interfaces. In this paper, we introduce a new set of heuristics that can be used to carry out usability inspections of VR systems via the Heuristic Evaluation method. The heuristics were developed to identify usability problems in both developing and currently-existing VR hardware and software. The heuristics reported here were developed by surveying VR users, and then using their data to identify nine classes of usability problems common to VR systems. The result is a new resource for UXRs who are seeking to use Heuristic Review to assess VR products.