Editorial: Everyday Virtual and Augmented Reality: Methods and Applications, Volume II

Daniel Zielasko, Christoph W. Borst, Sungchul Jung, Arindam Dey

Abstract: VR and AR technologies are on their way into our everyday life. They are entering public transit (Schmelter and Hildebrand, 3 2020), offices (Zielasko, 2020), training (Clifford et al., 2019), and education (Borst et al., 2018), to name a few. While much of 4 the knowledge gained in the last 5 decades of research in these fields is applicable to the use in people's daily lives, there are 5 also new contexts, questions, and challenges. As a continuation of the first volume (Borst et al., 2021), this Frontiers Research 6Topic presents articles that give answers and solutions to those. 7Two articles in this volume deal with places of daily life, which are team meetings and museums. Two other articles are 8 concerned with accessibility, namely cybersickness, and accessibility guidelines for VR gaming. 9In their field study, Bonfert et al., investigate the differences between off-the-shelf VR social platforms versus videoconferencing 10 for the purpose of weekly virtual team meetings over a period of 4 months. The authors assessed key measures such as social 11 interaction, productivity, and individual experiences. They find that VR solutions work and can even offer advantages, especially 12 when socializing around a meeting, but overall still suffer from many problems of nascent technology. This includes challenges 13 such as missing or only sparsely available (facial) expressions and gestures or status awareness of spatial sound, which should 14 be solved technologically in the next few years. There are also supposedly intrinsic problems, such as an increased technical 15 effort. However, the authors also conclude that established behaviors and processes do not necessarily get the best out of social 16VR platforms and that new opportunities exist for interaction with these. 17With their AR nuggets, Rau et al. develop reusable building blocks that are accessible to non-developers through the Unity 18 game engine and allow users to create non-linear, location-based content. Their building blocks abstract 5 different patterns 19 common in AR applications for museums: superimposition, object transparency, exploded views, sequential explanation, and, a 20 little bit less general, the visualization of sonar waves for the explanation of echolocation in natural history. They demonstrate 21 the applicability of their toolkit with domain experts of a history exhibition in the Senckenberg Museum in Germany.VR can be used in many places to create inclusion. But the technology itself is not yet accessible to everyone. Cybersickness is 23 one of the biggest inhibitors to the widespread adoption of VR technology. Effective research on the reasoning and mitigation 24 of this phenomenon requires a reliable measurement of the symptoms. In the absence of reliable and easy-to-use objective 25 measurement options, the standardized Simulator Sickness Questionnaire (Kennedy et al., 1993) is still the most widely used 26 measurement tool. Using SSQ to obtain a control measurement prior to the experiment is controversial, as subjects could be 27 manipulated by increased attention to their well-being or by divining a working hypothesis. However, Brown et al. in their study 28show that the assumption that healthy participants automatically enter an experiment with minimal or no symptoms seems to be 29 incorrect. Lastly, the authors encourage research into alternative methods of measurement as (medical) self-reports are prone to 30 inconsistency and are also known to be difficult to perform for a layman (c.f. Zielasko (2021)). 31 Heilemann et al. do an informal literature search on guidelines for accessibility and inclusion in the context of video gaming 32 and VR applications. On the data, they form an uncommented union of all rules, which can serve as a starting point for a more 33 comprehensive and widely acknowledged set of rules, as their analysis reveals that none of the existing standards and guidelines 34 are complete. 35DZ drafted this editorial with suggestions and approval from CB, SJ, and AD. 36