Discussing Your Needs in VR: A Novel Approach through Persona-based Stakeholder Role-Playing
Yi Wang, Zhengxin Zhang, Xiao Liu, Chetan Arora, John Grundy, Thuong Hoang
TL;DR
The paper tackles the challenge of facilitating requirements discussions in VR by automatically generating personas from real-time speech-to-text data and using a GPT-4-based analysis pipeline to drive discussion. The proposed system enables networked, multi-stakeholder collaboration with real-time transcription, emotion cues, and persona-driven analysis within a VR environment. In a pilot with 18 participants, the VR-based persona discussions achieved higher social presence and usability and notably reduced workload compared to traditional, manually anchored discussions. This work demonstrates the feasibility of persona-driven, VR-enabled RE discussions and highlights avenues for benchmarking against existing tools and expanding the approach to broader contexts.
Abstract
In this study, we propose a novel approach that supports requirements discussions in virtual environments by automatically generating personas from real-time speech-to-text data. In our pilot experiment, 18 participants (14 from universities and 4 from IT companies) used the generated personas to discuss accessibility requirements within the virtual environment. Participants reported a relatively high level of satisfaction with the social presence and usability of the VR system. We also found that requirements discussions based on personas have a lower workload. Finally, we outline the main directions for future work.