Towards Virtual Reality Crisis Simulation as a Tool for Usability Testing of Crisis Related Interactive Systems

Abstract

Usability testing is expensive in some domains due to the resource requirements that go hand in hand with taking a complex context of use into account. Crisis-related research is one such domain, typically requiring the reenactment of an extensive crisis scenario. To lessen the resource requirements and provide a more flexible setup geared towards testing, crisis scenarios can be reconstructed as virtual reality simulations. This paper outlines the development of an initial prototype of such a simulation following the design science method. The prototype is used to test if injecting an item that will be tested into the simulation affects the realism of the virtual reality crisis simulation. The realism was measured in a within-subject experiment and equivalence tests showed that injecting a representation of a simple app had no significant influence on the realism of the simulation.