Usability Engineering for Virtual Environments through a Framework of Usability Characteristics

The goal of muchwork in virtual environments VEs to date has been to produce innovative visual aural and haptic technology until recently there has been very little user centered usability focused research in VEs However there is beginning to be at least some awareness of the need for usability engineering within the VE community mostly addressing particular parts of the VE usability space This paper motivates the need for usability engineering methods speci cally for VEs and describes a framework of usability characteristics for VEs It gives a detailed example of use of the framework and supplemental VE usability resources in design and evaluation of a navigation metaphor for a real world battle eld visualization VE application Our goal is to increase awareness of the need for VE usability through this framework which in turn will be used to produce usability engineering methods for development of VEs