Context Calibration

The basic starting point of this paper is that ‘context’ constitutes most of the user interface when doing VR-related experiments, but even so one bases performance measures on only a few ‘active’ tasks. Thus, in order to meaningfully compare results obtained in vastly different experiments one needs to somehow ‘subtract’ the contribution to observables that are due to the context.

For the case where one is investigating whether changes in one observable causes changes in another, a method, context calibration, is proposed that does just that. This method is expected to, to a large extent, factor out the part of one's results that are due to factors that are not explicitly considered when evaluating the experiment, factors that the experimenter might not even suspect influences the experiment.

A procedure for systematically investigating the theoretical assumptions underlying context calibration is also discussed as is an initial experiment adhering to the proposed methodology.