[Master’s thesis] HCI Experiments inside Environmental Narrative Games

In cooperation with the Steel Minions game studio, I finished my British master’s thesis at Sheffield Hallam University. The topic was “HCI Experiments Inside Environmental Narrative Games: Expanding the REVEAL Framework” and can be summarized as follows:

Using existing games to conduct experiments about human-computer interaction makes them not only more fun and natural, but in the case of presence measurement in virtual reality also likely to be more effective. As a contribution to current research in this area, the environmental narrative game framework “REVEAL” was expanded by an experiment system which allows researchers to implement experiment scenarios without wider knowledge of the framework’s implementation, while still collecting all necessary data.

You can read my technical report here. The requirements for the technical contribution have been derived from my literature review about presence in virtual reality and my (first ever) research proposal to compare two locomotion techniques by the level of “presence” felt when using them. Together, these works form my British master’s thesis.

My own source code is available here on GitHub. Note that most of the REVEAL framework (which this work extends) depends on Sony’s PhyreEngine, which in turn is only available to developers having signed a nondisclosure agreement. The linked repository only contains the minimal references to REVEAL needed and is not functional on its own. However, since the plugin system for data recording mainly consists of C++ with standard templates, it might be possible to easily integrate it into other C++ projects.

Feel free to use any of the offered materials in your own work with the following (BibLaTeX) citation:

@mastersthesis{Schirm-2018-RevealExperiments,
  author  = {Johannes Schirm},
  title   = {HCI Experiments Inside Environmental Narrative Games: Expanding the REVEAL Framework},
  school  = {Sheffield Hallam University},
  year    = {2018},
  month   = {Sep},
  address = {Sheffield, England, UK},
  url     = {https://www.johannes-schirm.de/research/thesis/master-hci-experiments-reveal-framework/},
}