Using Heuristic Evaluation in Immersive Virtual Reality Evaluation

Previous works show that virtual reality itself can be used as a medium in which to stage an experimental evaluation. However, it is still unclear whether conventional usability evaluation methods can directly be applied to virtual reality evaluations and whether they will lead to similar insights when compared to equivalent real-world lab studies. Therefore, we conducted a user study with nine participants, comparing Heuristic Evaluation (HE) for the evaluations of a novel smart artefact. We asked participants to evaluate the physical prototype and their virtual counterparts in the real-world and the virtual environment, respectively. Results show the HE have similar performance when evaluating artefacts usability in VR and real-world in terms of identified usability problems. The VR implementation has an impact on the immersive VR evaluation result.