Academics and industrialists with an interest in evaluating virtual environments are invited to attend this new international workshop. Together we hope to identify the problems and solutions specific to VE usability studies, to share experiences, hear stories from the field, and to gain a good overview of what has been found already and what areas need future research.

Virtual Environments (VEs) are a novel application area of computing technology, demanding an understanding of human-computer interaction and computer mediated human interaction in virtual spaces. Standard usability engineering and HCI evaluation techniques do not directly address the usability problems introduced by these new applications. Exploratory and observational approaches seem promising avenues of inquiry at this stage, although it may not always be obvious how to apply these techniques.

A key aim of the workshop is to bring together practitioners from different application areas so that they can learn from each other’s experiences, so that they can meet, present their research and experiences, and exchange ideas. The topics of discussion during the workshop will have a broad technical scope and include:

• current state of the art of usability studies on VEs;
• problems and issues involved in evaluating VEs;
• approaches taken, and proposals for future research.

This one-day workshop will be based on hand-picked, topic-related small group discussion sessions, which report back to a plenary session at the end of the day.

Registration fees: students 10 pounds, BCS and British HCI group members 30 pounds, others 40 pounds. Attendees will receive workshop documentation.

The workshop can only be attended by people who submitted a position statement.

Programme Committee:

Chris Hand, Napier University, Edinburgh

Howell Istance, De Montfort University, Leicester

Kulwinder Kaur, City University, London

Anthony Steed, University College London (COVEN)

Jolanda Tromp, University of Nottingham (COVEN)

Professor John R. Wilson, Dep. of Manufacturing Engineering and Management, University of Nottingham

Professor Alistair Sutcliffe, Centre for HCI Design, School of Informatics, City University, London

Professor Steve Benford, Communications Research Group, University of Nottingham

Workshop Sponsors:

British HCI Group

De Montfort University

COVEN (EU ACTS Project N. AC040)

Workshop proceedings

This is an electronic version of the workshop proceedings. The official reference to this document is: Tromp, J.G., Kaur, K., Hand, C., Istance, H., Steed, A., (eds.), Proceedings of 1st International Usability Evaluation for Virtual Environments Workshop, UEVE'98, Leicester, December 1998.

Registration information:

Information on registration, accomodation, and travel to Leicester.

Details on Workshop Organizers:

Short bios (dated November 19980 on the workshop organisers.

One up in the hierarchy:

Page with general links about VE Evaluation discussion.

CRG Technologies
CRG Research
Communications Research Group
Department of Computer Science
University of Nottingham