CVE'96 was originally intended as a workshop, with lots of oppertunities to
discuss ideas for anybody that had some. Due to the large number of
attendents (85+) it turned into a conference-size gathering. :-) Luckily,
we were able to retain the discussion admosphere, and the half-hour
discussion slots at the end of each session were never silent!
I'd like to summarize what seems like the most important general consensus
which popped up again and again in the discussions.
The participants felt a need to increase the contact, joined work, and
knowledge exchange between computer science and the social sciences. (For
instance: Helen Walker's work on acceptance, needs, and requirements of
introducing CVE's in a large international manufacturing company, was seen
as useful information for the development and design of CVE's.)
It was felt that the social scientists and the computer scientists not
always speak each others technical language sufficiently well to understand
each others work. For this the proposed solution was a 'mediator' person,
who understands enough of both diciplines to introduce, organize, and guide
'Usability Studies' for CVE development.
I agree with these issues, and in fact I am such a mediator. I am a
psychologist employed in computer science to do usability studies of CVE's,
and was especially hired to bridge the gap between the diciplines. The
CVE'96 happening is one of the things which came out of this task. Because
I am bridging this gap, doing CVE usability studies has been a fairly
isolated endavour until the most recent UK VR SIG conference, where Chris
Hand, Kulwinder Kaur, and myself decided to organize ourselves to adress
the methodology of doing usability studies head-on.
At the CVE'96 happening I have asked people to sign up for a new mailing
list, in case they were interested in joining discussions about the
methodology of immersive 3D usability studies. The list will hopefully be
interesting to all people involved in doing interface evaluation work.
Everybody else who is symphatetic to the issue will hopefully find useful
information on the new WEB-pages for this mailing list.
Here is the URL to subscribe, watch these pages as they get built out based
on the collective usability experiences of the mailing-list subscribers.
http://www.crg.cs.nott.ac.uk/~jgt/ic3d2.html
"[H]uman perfectibility is in reality infinite, [and] the progress of this
perfectibility [...] has no other limit than the duration of the globe upon
which nature has placed us."
- Condorcet, quoted in: Heilbronner, 1995, Visions of the Future.