Virtual Reality Enabled Human-Centric Requirements Engineering

Human-centric requirements engineering aims to gather, analyse, and validate software requirements with a focus on human factors. However, human-centric requirements engineering is facing many challenges due to the limitations of conventional document-based or face-to-face interview-based requirements elicitation methods. To tackle those challenges, we propose a novel idea of using a virtual reality (VR) platform to facilitate human-centric requirements engineering. The key features of such a VR platform include automatic creation of 3D avatars based on user persona documents, the simulation of different environmental factors (e.g., lights and weather conditions), the simulation of different user conditions with special accessibility requirements (e.g., colour blindness), and the embodiment of user's perspective via the first-person view. A prototype system is developed to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed VR enabled human-centric requirements engineering platform. As an on-going work, we hope this paper will generate a series of new and interesting research in human-centric requirements engineering.