MSc Dissertation

In December 2022, I submitted this dissertation as part of my MSc studies at Northumbria University.

This paper looks at whether complex hierarchical cybersecurity information can be easily explored in the Metaverse.

That is, how easy is it for people to strap on a VR headset and then navigate & manipulate a 3D graph?

It found that users are distrustful of Meta (formerly Facebook), but are excited at the prospect of using VR for understanding complex data. Although none of the participants suffered from Cybersickness, there are concerns about the health implications of long-term use of VR equipment.

This was a small study with a limited number of participants, all of whom were familiar with the dataset being used.

If you wish to read the paper, you can download it in the following formats:

• HTML
• ePub
• PDF
• MarkDown

doi:10.48550/ARXIV.2304.10542

Background

You can read the blog posts chronicling my MSc.

Tools

This dissertation was written in Google Docs, using Zotero for citation management. It was exported to Markdown using Ed Bacher's Docs to Markdown. It was tidied up in VS Codium using Better Bibtex. Finally, it was exported using Pandoc and the Weasy PDF engine.

Citation Style

Cite Them Right 12th edition - Harvard.

Feel free to substitute for your own if you prefer other styles.

Creation

This uses Pandoc. It reads the MarkDown and the metadata.yml file. The metadata file includes all the boilerplate and tells Pandoc to replace all the @citations using the Better BibTex Bibliography.bib and format them according to the specified CSL. The metadata also tells it to use style.css for rendering.

The other command line options embed the necessary resources to create a standalone file.

HTML:

pandoc dissertation.md --citeproc --metadata-file=metadata.yml --embed-resources --standalone -o ../output/dissertation.html

ePub:

pandoc dissertation.md --citeproc --metadata-file=metadata.yml --epub-embed-font=fonts/Extended-Hyperlegible/TTF/Extended-Hyperlegible-Regular-103.ttf -o ../output/dissertation.epub

PDF:

pandoc dissertation.md --citeproc --metadata-file=metadata.yml --pdf-engine=weasyprint -o ../output/dissertation.pdf

TODO

Projects are never completed, only abandoned. Here are some things which need improving:

• Add better alt text to some images.
• Publish source code for DAG prototype.
• Open data for results used to create graphs.
• Endless formatting tweaks.
• Get a DOI.

Copyright and Copyleft

This document is 🄯 Terence Eden CC BY-NC 4.0.

It may not be used or retained in electronic systems for the detection of plagiarism. No part of it may be used for commercial purposes without prior permission.

Any source code is under the MIT Licence.

This document contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence for public sector information v3.0.