Real-world robot system deployment is often performed in complex and unstructured environments. These complex environments coupled with multi-faceted global tasks often lead to complicated stakeholder structures, making designing for these environments extremely challenging. Magnifying this difficulty, tasks performed in these environments often cannot be accomplished by a single robot or even single robot type because of the broad range of needs and psychical constraints of the robots. In these cases, heterogeneous robot teams may need to be coupled to human team members to perform the global tasks. From a Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) perspective, this increases the complexity of designing and deploying the system significantly, as now complicated stakeholder structures are mixed with complex robot teams. This paper presents a novel real-world system and interface design leveraging multiple mediums to balance stakeholder needs. To this end, the UI presented here incorporates features that support shared mental models (SMMs), trust establishment and development, and utilizes a centralized data distribution architecture to improve team performance. In addition to the interface, this paper presents a detailed look at the design process and the lessons learned from the perspective of a multi-year, real-world deployed system, as part of a large European project consisting of 21 partners from varying countries and backgrounds.

Performance and user satisfaction are key quality indicators in immersive analytics. Performance in terms of, e.g., error rate can only be measured if a ground truth is known to evaluate whether a user action or analysis result is erroneous. Thus, an estimate measure is needed to indicate the user's performance without having a ground truth available. This work investigates flow, sense of agency and presence as possible candidates in two experiments. First, these candidates are tested for their predictive value for task performance and satisfaction without task-related semantics to reduce bias from low task-interaction congruence. After the first experiment showed that only flow predicts performance and satisfaction, the second experiment tests flow, performance, and satisfaction in a realistic analytics scenario to improve external validity. The results suggest that flow experience might be a promising estimate for performance and satisfaction and thus quality of the immersive analytics tool.

The use of multi-robot systems is a field that can benefit from VR by strengthening understanding of the situation and enabling seamless interaction with the actors involved. This work investigates how the usability of a design for interaction with a multi-robot system for ship maintenance is assessed. Furthermore, comments from the participants are consulted as impulses for improving the design.

Psychological factors to be assessed by questionnaires, such as presence, may be influenced by variables like a break in presence induced by transitioning between physical and virtual reality - or time elapsed between the actual sensation and its measurement when questionnaires are used. Moreover, participants of previous experiments stated discomfort due to changing repeatedly between VR and non-VR. These aspects motivate the investigation of new ways of administering questionnaires in VR research. Previous attempts to integrate questionnaires into VR as world- or user-anchored canvases still lead to a clear separation between interaction for task and data acquisition in the virtual environment, which has been shown as problematic due to interruption of experience. Therefore, this work goes one step further by integrating the answering of the questionnaire into the actual task using the same interaction technique and metaphor. We implemented a bow and arrow game in which the player had to shoot at randomly spawning targets as fast and accurate as possible. Subsequently, the player had to answer each item of a questionnaire by actually shooting at a target that represented the rating with the same type of interaction method. No difference in presence (SUS-PQ), satisfaction (ASQ) or workload (SMEQ) ratings was found between questionnaires presented either embedded in VR (as described above), as text panel in VR or as desktop PC version. In conclusion, the embedded questionnaires may render less negative effects of transitioning between VR and non-VR without impairing the questionnaire results.