In a fast-evolving news media landscape, journalists are exploring the potential of Extended Reality (XR) technologies to connect with their news consumers and to attract new audiences. Our research focuses how Social XR can contribute to establish social interactions between journalist and news consumers in a shared virtual environment (VE). Derived from four qualitative co-creation workshops with both user groups, we present a set of user requirements to keep into account for the creation of a user-centred Social XR environment where such engaging interactions occur.

Evaluating immersive experiences, such as Virtual Reality (VR), is often done through User Experience (UX) and Quality of Experience (QoE) evaluations. Here, methodologies such as conducting experiments, the use of questionnaires or data logging can provide valuable insights into implicit user behaviour in their interactions with interactive media experiences (IMX). These quantitative methods can be combined with qualitative methods for user evaluation purposes, making it a mixed methods approach. Consulting literature, extensive research has been done to discover the various benefits and pitfalls of incorporating a mixed methods approach in evaluation studies. However, there is limited research on the added value of a qualitative research methodology in VR user evaluation studies and how these qualitative findings can provide novel insights. This paper presents a mixed-method user evaluation study of VR Planica, a novel VR experience developed by HSLU together with AFP, RTVSLO, Sparknews and VUB as part of the EU project TRANSMIXR. We begin by outlining the conceptual differences between QoE and UX, as well as the conceptual outline of mixed method approaches for user evaluation. Next, we describe our evaluation set-up, and our mixed methods approach applied in the VR Planica user evaluation study involving 33 participants. Drawing on the qualitative data, we reveal insights into how participants experienced and interpreted the experience, which helped deepen the interpretation of the quantitative results. We conclude by emphasizing the added value of a qualitative methodology in VR user evaluation studies and advocate for the use of mixed method approaches to better capture user perspectives.

Motivated to create a children’s VR game for the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (NISV), this research asks how might we design an immersive game for children to meaningfully interact with media and metadata in cultural heritage contexts? First, during a ‘design salon,’ 13 data and heritage experts challenged children’s ability to interact with metadata. In response, we ran workshops with 19 children focused on understanding abstract media and data. We found that while (1) metadata has many challenges, (2) children understand abstract data when it is grounded in concrete experiences, are (3) motivated to interact with archival media through in immersive and collaborative contexts, and (4) are interested in exploring media diversity through categorisation games with high-level narrative goals. These findings inform our game concept and three core insights for designing immersive experiences for cultural heritage: Considering the Contextual Complexity of Data and Audience Needs, Connecting Data Abstractions to Embodied Narratives Through Categorisation Mechanics, and Supporting Abstract Meaning Making Using the Immersive Affordances of VR.