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The advent of Virtual Reality (VR) has created new user-interaction paradigms that VR designers need to attend to in order to avoid usability issues. Currently, there are few formal methods for evaluating the usability of VR interfaces. In this paper, we introduce a new set of heuristics that can be used to carry out usability inspections of VR systems via the Heuristic Evaluation method. The heuristics were developed to identify usability problems in both developing and currently-existing VR hardware and software. The heuristics reported here were developed by surveying VR users, and then using their data to identify nine classes of usability problems common to VR systems. The result is a new resource for UXRs who are seeking to use Heuristic Review to assess VR products.

Highly mobile computing devices promise to improve quality of life, productivity, and performance. Increased situation awareness and reduced mental workload are two potential means by which this can be accomplished. However, it is difficult to measure these concepts in the “wild”. We employed ultra-portable battery operated and wireless functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to non-invasively measure hemodynamic changes in the brain’s Prefrontal cortex (PFC). Measurements were taken during navigation of a college campus with either a hand-held display, or an Augmented reality wearable display (ARWD). Hemodynamic measures were also paired with secondary tasks of visual perception and auditory working memory to provide behavioral assessment of situation awareness and mental workload. Navigating with an augmented reality wearable display produced the least workload during the auditory working memory task, and a trend for improved situation awareness in our measures of prefrontal hemodynamics. The hemodynamics associated with errors were also different between the two devices. Errors with an augmented reality wearable display were associated with increased prefrontal activity and the opposite was observed for the hand-held display. This suggests that the cognitive mechanisms underlying errors between the two devices differ. These findings show fNIRS is a valuable tool for assessing new technology in ecologically valid settings and that ARWDs offer benefits with regards to mental workload while navigating, and potentially superior situation awareness with improved display design.