VT Xplore: AR Based Student Tour

To determine whether the inclusion of augmented reality (AR) experience into the undergraduate recruitment lifecycle can improve enrollment into Virginia Tech (VT).

We found that an AR interface would be beneficial to the undergraduate recruitment lifecycle and there is much scope for more research & evaluation.

Timeline: The project was completed in four phases over the Spring 2019 semester at Virginia Tech.

My Role

• Research: Literature review, Interview moderator, Focus group moderator

• Design & Prototyping: Work activity affinity diagramming (WAAD) moderation, User story generation, Storyboard generation, Design Generation

• Testing: Observation and analysis

Planning, Scoping and Defining the Problem

• A literature review on augmented reality (AR) and its use in tourism showed evidence that AR could be beneficial for getting people interested in a place or building.

• Mobile AR technologies have started to mature enough to build a user-friendly interface for prospective students

• AR technology is effective in bringing people into a new environment

• Understanding the end users’ (high school students) needs and stakeholders’ requirements would be pertinent to designing a good experience.

Phase II: Exploration, Synthesis, and Design Implications

To date, universities use many orthodox methodologies to recruit students, such as college fairs, campus tours, email lists, and traditional and digital media. We conducted Focus groups and interviews to understand what students felt about the recruitment process and what the stakeholders expected in the AR recruitment tool.

Focus Groups

• Get to know what students felt about these existing outreach methods.

• Learned what they liked about Virginia Tech (our primary client).

• Understand the motivations and frustrations with the recruitment system.

• 6 students participated in the focus groups.

Interviewing the Stakeholders

Phase III: Concept Generation & Prototyping

Organizing our thoughts & findings

We conducted an affinity diagramming session to organize our findings so that we could focus on features of the AR tool that would work best for our first prototype. This exercise helped us select features for our AR tool design as well as think about how it would fit into the recruitment lifecycle.

Visualizing the user journey

Using the results from the affinity diagramming session and our previous steps to supplement our thought process, we started building our user journey. We started thinking about. We already knew about the Who of project, that is the high school students. This step in our activity helped finalize the What, Where and How.

At the end of the exercise, we finalized the following,

• Where - At local college fairs, this would allow us to increase the reach of the recruitment campaign to students who would not otherwise have had the opportunity to visit Virginia Tech’s campus. Additionally, they would be able to experience different elements of VT that websites and other forms of outreach would not be able to give.

• What - An Augmented Reality interface that would help students explore Virginia Tech’s campus interactively.

• How - Using a tabletop AR interface that works with AR enabling headsets like Google’s Cardboard or a hololens that would be provided to them.

The user journey would look something like this,

1. The student entered the college fair

2. The student would notice the AR table and headsets at th Virginia Tech stall'

3. The student grabbed the headsets

4. The student would SCAN the QR code, or a similar link that would enable them to install the VT AR app.

5. The student would be able to immediately interact with the table top AR.

The Storyboard

We built a storyboard to help visualize to our stakeholders hand to ourselves as how we would try and implement this AR tool and how it would help improve undergraduate recruitment.

Prototyping

To test and visualize our idea we built a prototype. Our need to rapidly prototype and test our design pushed us to using the tools in hand. We used an HTC vive pro to run a video pass-through AR experience for testing. Using openstreetmap, we downloaded a 3D rendering of Virginia Tech’s campus and built a simple interface.

Phase IV: Experiment design and evaluation

We designed our experiment to learn three key things,

1. A survey to learn initial opinions and experience with AR

2. A task to test efficiency and observe gestures

3. A short interview to gauge usefulness of the AR tool

4. 
   Pre Task Interview

Here we asked participants about their experience with AR.

The Task

1. Find a target building

2. Zoom in using gestures ( free to choose what they like )

3. Select using gesture ( free to choose what they like )

4. Exit using gesture ( free to choose what they like )

5. Interview, this was repeated a total of 3 times for 3 target buildings: Buruss Hall, McComas Hall and Cassel Colosseum.

Post Task Interview.

Here we asked participants about their overall experience using the AR tool. We also asked them about their favorite gestures for zoom, open and exit tasks. Additionally, we also used different 3D icons for each building, which were of three types, Orbs, pins and pill shapes.

Results

We tested 4 participants in this short usability and user experience evaluation. Due to the short duration of our coursework. Each participant was a undergraduate student at Virginia Tech. According to Nielsen and Landauer (1993), you can find as much as 80% of usability issues with just five users.

Initial Interview Result

All participants had experienced AR in one way or another, but their experience was very limited to games and headsets available at events. They also found the AR technology to be intriguing and cool. Participants also indicated they would love to learn more about the technology.

Task Results

Participants took between 7 seconds and 11 seconds to find target buildings. The timing seemed to have a lot to do with participants not having a clear mental model of Virginia Tech, which would be the case with most of our target demographic.

Gestures

1. Zoom In - Participants preferred pinching out or tapping when zooming in to buildings, with either one hand or two hands.

2. Select - Participants tended to tap or grab and pull when selecting a building.

3. Zoom out/exit - Here the results were varied, each participant used different techniques. From pointing to the sky, or pointing to windows\doors, each participant did something different to exit buildings.

Icons

Participants showed more interest in the ball and pin-shaped icons as they were more salient.

Interview & Final Evaluation

• Overall, participants seemed to like the idea of the project. Participants rated the experience of using an AR system with an average score of 7.75 on 10.

• Although they were able to perform the tasks efficiently, we realized more testing would be required to understand how students react to newer environments.

• The general response to the AR student tour was positive and helped identify important interface elements to include into a future design such as,

  • Visual cues to identify major locations on a mop

  • Reducing clutter on an AR interface

  • Identifying simple and easy-to-learn gestures to interact with the interface such as pinch & zooming

So What Does this Mean?

• This study is a great example of using the power of a rapid prototype to evaluate an interface’s capability and effectiveness in achieving its goals.

• This exploratory phase helped identify useful avenues for student outreach.

• This study also helped show the value of incorporating AR/VR into helping people immerse themselves in to a new environment.

• Additionally, more iterations on the prototype would have helped refine our design. Future interfaces should also include an information overlay that would allow students to navigate more seamlessly.

• Overall, this exercise was an important learning experience of going over the design lifecycle and using various UX methodologies to design build and evaluate a product.