Auto-Generating Personas from User Reviews in VR App Stores

2026-03-05

AI Summary

This study addresses the lack of effective persona methods in current VR design that support designers’ understanding of accessibility needs, thereby limiting empathetic engagement and inclusive innovation. To bridge this gap, the authors propose an automated natural language processing–based approach that extracts salient features from user reviews in VR application stores to generate representative personas. For the first time, this method is integrated into a VR education context to guide students in identifying and discussing latent accessibility requirements. Experimental results demonstrate that the approach significantly enhances students’ empathetic efficiency toward users with disabilities and successfully uncovers multiple actionable accessibility design opportunities. These findings validate the effectiveness and practical potential of automatically generated personas in fostering inclusive VR development.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: AI for Accessibility
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Computer Vision: Bias, Fairness & Privacy

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics

Abstract

Personas are a valuable tool for discussing accessibility requirements in software design and development practices. However, the use of personas for accessibility-focused requirements elicitation in VR projects remains limited and is accompanied by several challenges. To fill this gap, we developed an auto-generated persona system in a VR course, where the personas were used to facilitate discussions on accessibility requirements and to guide VR design and development. Our findings indicate that the auto-generated persona system enabled students to develop empathy more efficiently. This study demonstrates the use of automatically generated personas in VR course settings as a means of eliciting latent accessibility requirements.

Problem

• personas
• accessibility requirements
• virtual reality
• user reviews
• requirements elicitation

Innovation

• auto-generated personas
• VR accessibility
• user reviews
• requirements elicitation
• empathy in design