A platform for conducting survey interviews in virtual reality.
An interviewee wears a VR headset and sits across from an avatar in a shared virtual room; the interviewer sits at an ordinary web browser. The two are connected by a live audio/video link, and everything that happens - speech, gaze, posture, hand movement, answers given - is recorded in a single, time-aligned data set.
Built at the Text Technology Lab for the FACES project (Feasibility, acceptance, and data quality of new multimodal surveys, DFG 539621548), part of DFG SPP 2431 New Data Spaces.
| Path | Contents |
|---|---|
docker-compose.yml |
The full service stack |
janus/conf.d/ |
The two Janus config files InterView overrides |
coturn/ |
TURN server configuration |
website/ |
Web client source (interviewer console and browser participant view) |
docs/ |
Documentation source (MkDocs Material) |
git clone https://github.com/texttechnologylab/InterView.git
cd InterView
cp .env.example .env # fill in MongoDB credentials and an API key
docker compose up -dRead the Setup Guide before deploying - the stack requires an external MongoDB and a TLS-terminating reverse proxy, and will not work without them.
| Service | Role |
|---|---|
| Janus | WebRTC SFU - audio/video plus the control data channel. Image from Janus-Gateway |
| coturn | TURN relay (optional) |
| Ubiq | VR room and avatar state synchronisation |
| Logging API | Tracking data and events → MongoDB |
| Web client | Interviewer console and browser participant view. Source in website/ |
| Repository | Contains |
|---|---|
| Va.Si.Li-Lab | The VR client and the framework it is built on |
| Va.Si.Li-Lab-backend | Ubiq server and database/logging API sources |
| Janus-Gateway | The pinned Janus image this stack runs |
Unity and VR-side documentation lives in the Va.Si.Li-Lab docs.
For InterView, please cite:
@misc{Schrottenbacher:et:al:2026,
title = {{InterView}: Towards a Unified {VR}-Capable Interview Environment},
author = {Schrottenbacher, Patrick},
year = {2026},
note = {Preprint},
howpublished = {SSRN},
doi = {10.2139/ssrn.XXXXXXX},
url = {https://ssrn.com/abstract=XXXXXXX}
}For the Virtual Reality Platform (Va.Si.Li-Lab), please cite:
@inproceedings{Mehler:et:al:2023:a,
author = {Mehler, Alexander and Bagci, Mevl{\"u}t and Henlein, Alexander
and Abrami, Giuseppe and Spiekermann, Christian and Schrottenbacher, Patrick
and Konca, Maxim and L{\"u}cking, Andy and Engel, Juliane and Quintino, Marc
and Schreiber, Jakob and Saukel, Kevin and Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia, Olga},
title = {A Multimodal Data Model for Simulation-Based Learning with Va.Si.Li-Lab},
booktitle = {Digital Human Modeling and Applications in Health, Safety, Ergonomics and Risk Management},
publisher = {Springer Nature Switzerland},
address = {Cham},
pages = {539--565},
year = {2023},
doi = {10.1007/978-3-031-35741-1_39}
}