VR ethnography: a pilot study on the use of virtual reality ‘go-along’ interviews in Google street view
PubDate: November 2019
Teams: University of Oulu
Writers: Panos Kostakos, Paula Alavesa, Jonas Oppenlaender, Simo Hosio
Abstract
Go-along interviewing is an emerging qualitative research method for eliciting contextualised perspectives in which informants and observers conduct mobile interviews while navigating in real or imagined sites. This paper describes results of a pilot study that use virtual reality (VR) go-along interviews to explore university community members’ (N=6) contextualized perceptions of urban habitat fragmentation due to new transportation infrastructure. Participants were immersed into the popular Google Street View and asked to navigate from the University campus to the city center. Along that route, construction sites featured in 360° images acted as prompts for discussing ecological change. Preliminary results indicate that VR go-along interviews are able to evoke emotions and inform a broad range of research questions with regards to both verbal and non-verbal feedback received from the informants.
