Heuristics Evaluation and Improvements for Low-Cost Virtual Reality

The User Centered Design methodology consists of an iterative cycle of analysis, ideation, prototyping, and evaluation. In this context, heuristic evaluations are valuable tools to identify usability problems in an interface from the earliest stages of design. However, there are few well-defined heuristics for Virtual Environments. Based on this, the objective of this research is to verify and improve two heuristic evaluations, one proposed by Sutcliff and Gault [33] and other by Rusu et al [29], with both applied for Virtual Reality environments in the context of devices as the Google Cardboard. In order to reach this goal, a case study was conducted based on two games, using the "Supernatural: the origin" for the heuristics of Sutcliff and Gault, and for the heuristics of Rusu et al. the game "Lamper VR: Firefly Rescue" was used. The heuristics evaluation was performed through an adapted SUS (Scale Usability System). From the obtained results, it was possible to elaborate a list of recommendations and improvements based on the reported errors, as a way to obtain more consistent heuristics. As for recommendations that have emerged, it is possible to highlight that "context" and "objective" of the applications are very relevant items to observe and "application characteristics" like movement freedom or configuration options cannot be applied as universal rules.