A Virtual Workshop at ISMAR 2022

Monday, October 17, 2022

08:30 - 14:30, Singapore Standard Time (GMT+08)

Call for Participation

In recent years we have seen breakthroughs in consumer-level Virtual Reality (VR) technology that are resulting in a dramatic acceleration of consumer, professional, and corporate interest. VR promises benefits in a wide range of areas including scientific research, education, healthcare training and practice, social interactions, and personal well-being. These benefits should be available to everyone, regardless of their age, gender, race, culture, ethnicity, class, ability, and neurodiversity. Unfortunately, the vast majority of VR research studies rely heavily on small convenience samples of homogeneous college-aged participants, e.g., majority White and middle to upper class undergraduate students, which results in study populations that are not representative of the population at large, and findings that are difficult to generalize. This is, in part, due to a combination of deadline-driven publication pressures and a lack of ready access to representative populations. The XR community is becoming aware of and motivated to remedy this problem. In addition, the committees that oversee the community’s journals, conferences, and other activities are increasingly demanding higher-quality human subject research studies based on larger and more inclusive study populations.

The workshop should be of interest to XR researchers in academia and industry who seek to improve the scientific rigor of the XR community’s human subject research, as well as industrial practitioners and developers who seek the broadest possible impacts and markets for their XR applications.

As reflected in the schedule, this workshop will begin with some short talks from some relevant "outsiders" to the XR community — individuals with important relevant perspectives. These talks will set the stage for the subsequent discussion sessions. In the discussion sessions we will discuss topics such as relationships with communities of interest; relevant conference and journal practices and policies; and participant considerations at points before a study (e.g., recruitment), during a study (e.g., hardware issues, questionnaires), and after a study (e.g., how to discuss data/restuls, and how to keep the communities informed/involved).

After the workshop the organizers plan to develop and publish a position paper/ report documenting the findings of the workshop.