Towards Workplace Metaverse: A Human-Centered Approach for Designing and Evaluating XR Virtual Displays

Abstract

Work is becoming more and more flexible nowadays. It can take place in the office, at home, or even on the go; tasks may encompass activities in the form of documents, multimedia, or 3D models in virtual space. Under such circumstances, personal computers (PC), the most widely used productivity devices for work today, cannot well address the diverse needs such as screen size, privacy, and flexibility to display diverse content formats (e.g., 2D to 3D), due to their fixed hardware specs. We believe the solution lies in Extended Reality (XR). In this article, we explored how XR glasses can be used for PC’s virtual extended displays, and conducted user interviews and usability tests to propose a systematic user experience design and evaluation framework. We discovered that the design space encompasses four dimensions general placement, display specs, operating system integration, and interaction behaviors) and summarized users’ corresponding preferences. We proposed a quality-of-experience (QoE) evaluation framework for XR virtual displays consisting of visual quality, visual fatigue and discomfort, as well as immersiveness, and identified clarity as the most significant factor that affects user satisfaction. Our design and evaluation frameworks could serve as a resource for both practitioners and scholars with an interest in the design and evaluation of virtual displays.

Keywords:

• Virtual display
• quality-of-experience
• design space
• human-centered
• extended reality

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Juan David Hincapie-Ramos, Xin Jiang, Yubao Liu, Laibin Zhang, and Qi Li for their assistance in designing and building the PCXR demo. And thanks to Meng Wu for the assistance in gathering and analyzing user data.

Disclosure statement

The authors report there has been no conflict of interest to the guest editorial board and the managing editor. And all the authors agreed on the submission and publication of this paper.

Notes

1 https://unity.com/

2 https://www.ptc.com/en/products/vuforia

3 https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/thinkrealitya3/

4 https://lumusvision.com/products/oe50/

5 https://www.st.com/en/mems-and-sensors/inemo-inertial-modules.html

6 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/direct3ddxgi/d3d10-graphics-programming-guide-dxgi

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yu Zhang

Yu Zhang received his B.Eng. in human factors, B.Sc. in applied mathematics in 2008, and M.Eng. in engineering physics in 2011 from Beihang University, China. He is currently a principal researcher at Lenovo and a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at Southeast University, China. His research interests include human-centered AI.

Jingwei Sun

Jingwei Sun received her B.S. degree in Psychology, B.S. (Minor) degree in Statistics, Ph.D. degree in Basic Psychology from Peking University, China, in 2014, 2014, and 2020, respectively. She is currently a HCI Researcher at Lenovo Research. Her research interests include human-computer interaction and human-centered AI.

Qicheng Ding

Qicheng Ding received his B.S. degree in psychology and M.S. degree in applied psychology from Peking University, Beijing, China, in 2011 and 2013, respectively. He is currently a User Researcher with Tencent and was a UX Researcher with Lenovo Research. His research interests include human-computer interaction and user experience.

Liuxin Zhang

Liuxin Zhang received B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the Beijing Institute of Technology, China, in 2004 and 2010, respectively. He is currently a Technology Director at Lenovo, leading Human-Computer Interaction Innovation Team. His research interests focused on computer vision and human-computer interaction.

Qianying Wang

Qianying Wang received her Ph.D degree in Human-Computer Interaction from Stanford University, and her Master Degrees in both Electronic Engineering and Industrial Management from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. She is currently a corporate Vice President of Lenovo Group. Her research interests include human-computer interaction, hyperreality space computing and immersive media.

Xin Geng

Xin Geng received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from Deakin University, Australia, in 2008. He is currently a professor and dean at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University, China. His research interests include machine learning, pattern recognition, and computer vision.

Yong Rui

Yong Rui received his Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA in 1999. He is currently the CTO and SVP of Lenovo, a Fellow of ACM/IEEE/AAAS/IAPR/SPIE/CCF/CAAI, and a Foreign Member of Academia Europaea. His research interests include multimedia, artificial intelligence, and knowledge mining.