Web-Based VR Experiments Powered by the Crowd
PubDate: Feb 2018
Teams: Cornell Tech & Cornell University
Writers: Xiao Ma, Megan Cackett, Leslie Park, Eric Chien, Mor Naaman
PDF: Web-Based VR Experiments Powered by the Crowd
Abstract
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.