As part of the TRANSMIXR work on WP4, the Distributed and Interactive Systems (DIS) group from CWI presented the work “A Platform for Collecting User Behaviour Data during Social VR Experiments Using Mozilla Hubs” at the 16th international workshop on IMmersive Mixed and Virtual Environment Systems (MMVE 2024). The workshop is co-located with ACM MMSys 2024, a premier conference on multimedia systems.
In recent years, a large variety of online communication tools have emerged, including social Virtual Reality (VR) platforms for interacting in a virtual world with participants being represented as virtual avatars. VR goes beyond traditional remote communication technologies, putting the users at the center of the action and providing them with a sense of immersion and new interactive capabilities. Going one step further, social VR applications enable the virtual co-presence of multiple users within the same virtual environment, allowing body interactions similar to face-to-face communication redefining the way individuals engage in virtual experience. Understanding the different interpersonal interaction in virtual environments is crucial to improve the user experience. To do so, however, researchers need social VR platforms that enable experimentation at large scale on online platforms and the accurate logging of behavioural data (e.g. body position and rotation, interaction modalities or audio information). In this work we fill this gap by presenting an easy-to-deploy tool for collecting and storing behavioural data from the popular social VR tool Mozilla Hubs. Our solution can be integrated into a running instance of Hubs to gather data from participants within a browser environment. Collected data is stored off-site using an optimised purpose-built web server in a compressed format, making it possible to store substantial amounts of data without placing too much load on the host system.
The proposed tool is available at https://github.com/cwi-dis/mozillahubs-datalogger.
Scientific article:
Thomas Röggla, David A. Shamma, Julie R. Williamson, Irene Viola, Silvia Rossi, and Pablo Cesar. 2024. A Platform for Collecting User Behaviour Data during Social VR Experiments Using Mozilla Hubs. In Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Immersive Mixed and Virtual Environment Systems (MMVE ’24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 41–44. https://doi.org/10.1145/3652212.3652225