Yifei Liu at HCI 2018
The BCNM was pleased to support its students presenting research at the premiere conferences in their field by helping to defray the costs of attendance. Yifei Liu (Information) describes below her experience at the 20th International Human Computer Interactions Conference in Las Vegas.
I had a chance to present at the 20th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction in Las Vegas on July 19. The paper on “Usability Evaluation for Drone Mission Planning in Virtual Reality” was conducted with Nancy Yang and Alyssa Li in collaboration with Professor Allen Yang and the Immersive Semi-Autonomous Aerial Command System (ISAACS) lab at UC Berkeley College of Engineering. I opened my presentation with an overview on the current workflow of flying unmanned aerial vehicles (or drones) and how the immersive experience in VR could benefit the drone mission planning. As VR enables more complex and detailed plannings, and reduces users’ errors, it could improve the workflow efficiency and lower the technical bar of drone usage for non-technical users. I introduced our HCI metrics on evaluating the usability of VR interface in 7 dimensions, namely immersion, navigation, interaction, comfort, intuitive, consistency and clarity. And then I discussed the research results from two iterations of user testings and prototyping, and presented four insights from our paper: 1) a step-by-step interactive onboarding tutorial in VR interface is crucial in decreasing users’ error rate and reducing their task completion time; 2) minimizing input controls would decrease the error rate as it prevents users’ cognitive overload; 3) participants reported improved satisfaction, immersion, and intuitiveness when they have more interactions that imitate the real world, such as grabbing and dragging; 4) immediate feedback and visibility for system state changes reduces error rate and users’ frustration.