Evaluation of a Virtual Reality-based Buffet to Address Challenges in Health Research and Practice

摘要

1 EVALUATION OF A VIRTUAL REALITY-BASED BUFFET TO ADDRESS CHALLENGES IN HEALTH RESEARCH AND PRACTICE The Immersive Virtual Environment Testing Area (IVETA) is a behavioral science laboratory offering tools and expert support for virtual reality (VR)-based health research at the National Institutes of Health. We design VR tools to tackle methodological and communication challenges in the domain of health research and practice, with a specialty in genomics. One of our most useful VR tools is a custom virtual reality application intended to simulate a buffet food choice experience in a typical cafeteria setting. Food choice practices are a crucial research topic, but it remains difficult to assess as few methods exist to measure choices and their nutritional content accurately in real-time. The simulation is typically used to conduct experiments on child feeding, involving parents of children between the ages of 3 and 7. Participants walk freely around the buffet, navigating food choices in an environment designed specifically to fit in the bounds of our lab space. The VR buffet was designed initially for legacy virtual reality hardware but has since been through several iterations and is primarily to be used with the readily available HTC Vive system. Given that most of our study participants lacked any experience with virtual reality, and our goal was to simulate a familiar, real world activity, important design decisions for ease of use needed to be made from the start. Therefore, the input mapping for the Vive controllers was made to be dead simple: with a single click, participants could either add or subtract one portion of food to or from their plate.