Multi-sensory immersion to improve the user experience in the decision-making process

Abstract

In daily life, human beings interact with the real world in an intrinsic multi-sensory way, obtaining information and interacting through the use of various senses that allow them to perceive the environment. At a computational level there are virtual environments with which people are allowed to interact with certain degrees of freedom in which the user experience is sought to be as friendly as possible and allowing the user to feel comfortable and involved with the virtual environment. This work presents a collection of information on related work of multi-sensory human-computer interaction, in which users interact with a virtual environment through the use of various senses. The user experience, can be defined as dealing with how the user feels and understands the virtual environment when using it. Collaborative decision-making, which is the process in which two or more people meet to solve a concern cooperatively seeking to achieve a consensus after analyzing the situation and the different scenarios that it has. A Decision-Making Centers allows decision-makers to visualize and carry out large-scale analysis in person, interacting and collaborating with each other to reach a consensus that benefits all parties involved, immersive virtual reality, which are virtual environments in which the user has a greater sense of presence within the environment, and remote sessions in real-time, which are the way to communicate at a distance in real-time. In addition, this work addresses the need to have an immersive multi-sensory virtual environment in which people can come together to make collaborative decisions remotely in real-time, allowing decision-makers to feel as if they were in a traditional Decision-Making Center in person, but with the advantages offered by multi-sensory, immersive, remote, collaborative virtual reality in real-time. Therefore, a software architecture is proposed that allows the creation of Multi-sensory Virtual Decision-Making Centers (MVDC) with the capabilities of being collaborative, immersive, and remote in real-time. Together with this architecture, a multi-sensory environment was created which is the first MVDC that exists, this MVDC has the characteristics and capabilities to carry out remote collaborative decision-making sessions in real-time in addition to adding an immersive multi-sensory experience while using it, ensuring that the sense of presence among decision-makers is not lost and allowing the remote decision-making session to be as similar to a face-to-face session. Along with this, an experiment and analysis of the results are carried out to validate the improvement of the user experience when carrying out remote decision-making sessions in real-time with the MVDC environment. Finally, the conclusions obtained from the work carried out are presented and some ideas and recommendations are presented for future work related to what has been presented.