Lose Yourself in VR: Exploring the Effects of Virtual Reality on Individuals’ Immersion

Virtual reality (VR) technology generates an interactive virtual environment (VE) creating unique users’ experiences. A central part of VR experience is being immersed into a VE. Immersion factors, such as technological and perceptual features, are described in detail in non-immersive VR settings. However, advancements in VR technology, such as head-mounted displays with high resolution and precise motion tracking systems, that improve interactivity within the VE are not yet adequately considered. We conducted twelve semi-structured interviews immediately after respondents played highly immersive games using state-of-the-art VR equipment to identify novel immersion factors in this setting. The findings yield eleven immersion factors across three categories: (1) physical and physiological aspects, (2) cognitive and affective aspects, (3) social interaction and shared experience. Within these categories factors named “shared experience” and “translating actions from physical to virtual reality” were found as novel immersion factors in the VR context

Towards a Human-Centered Approach for VRET Systems: Case Study for Acrophobia

This paper presents a human-centered methodology for designing and developing Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy (VRET) systems. By following the steps proposed by the methodology – Users analysis, Domain Analysis, Task Analysis and Representational Analysis, we developed a system for acrophobia therapy composed of 9 functional, interrelated modules which are responsible for patients, scenes, audio and graphics management, as well as with physiological monitoring and event triggering. The therapist visualizes in real time the patient’s biophysical signals and adapts the exposure scenario accordingly, as. he can lower or increase the level of exposure. There are 3 scenes in the game, depicting a ride by cable car, one by ski lift and a walk by foot in a mountain landscape. A reward system is implemented and emotion dimension ratings are collected at predefined points in the scenario. They will be stored and later used for constructing an automatic machine learning emotion recognition and exposure adaptation modul

An Analysis of Physiological and Psychological Responses in Virtual Reality and Flat Screen Gaming

Recent research has focused on the effectiveness of Virtual Reality (VR) in games as a more immersive method of interaction. However, there is a lack of robust analysis of the physiological effects between VR and flatscreen (FS) gaming. This paper introduces the first systematic comparison and analysis of emotional and physiological responses to commercially available games in VR and FS environments. To elicit these responses, we first selected four games through a pilot study of 6 participants to cover all four quadrants of the valence-arousal space. Using these games, we recorded the physiological activity, including Blood Volume Pulse and Electrodermal Activity, and self-reported emotions of 33 participants in a user study. Our data analysis revealed that VR gaming elicited more pronounced emotions, higher arousal, increased cognitive load and stress, and lower dominance than FS gaming. The Virtual Reality and Flat Screen (VRFS) dataset, containing over 15 hours of multimodal data comparing FS and VR gaming across different games, is also made publicly available for research purposes. Our analysis provides valuable insights for further investigations into the physiological and emotional effects of VR and FS gaming.Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessibl

Designing interactive virtual environments with feedback in health applications.

One of the most important factors to influence user experience in human-computer interaction is the user emotional reaction. Interactive environments including serious games that are responsive to user emotions improve their effectiveness and user satisfactions. Testing and training for user emotional competence is meaningful in healthcare field, which has motivated us to analyze immersive affective games using emotional feedbacks. In this dissertation, a systematic model of designing interactive environment is presented, which consists of three essential modules: affect modeling, affect recognition, and affect control. In order to collect data for analysis and construct these modules, a series of experiments were conducted using virtual reality (VR) to evoke user emotional reactions and monitoring the reactions by physiological data. The analysis results lead to the novel approach of a framework to design affective gaming in virtual reality, including the descriptions on the aspects of interaction mechanism, graph-based structure, and user modeling. Oculus Rift was used in the experiments to provide immersive virtual reality with affective scenarios, and a sample application was implemented as cross-platform VR physical training serious game for elderly people to demonstrate the essential parts of the framework. The measurements of playability and effectiveness are discussed. The introduced framework should be used as a guiding principle for designing affective VR serious games. Possible healthcare applications include emotion competence training, educational softwares, as well as therapy methods

A Reflection on Virtual Reality Design for Psychological, Cognitive & Behavioral Interventions: Design Needs, Opportunities & Challenges

Despite the substantial research interest in using Virtual Reality (VR) in healthcare in general and in Psychological, Cognitive, and Behavioral (PC&B) interventions in specific, as well as emerging research supporting the efficacy of VR in healthcare, the design process of translating therapies into VR to meet the needs of critical stakeholders such as users and clinicians is rarely addressed. In this paper, we aim to shed light onto the design needs, opportunities and challenges in designing efficient and effective PC&B-VR interventions. Through analyzing the co-design processes of four user-centered PC&B-VR interventions, we examined how therapies were adapted into VR to meet stakeholders’ requirements, explored design elements for meaningful experiences, and investigated how the understanding of healthcare contexts contribute to the VR intervention design. This paper presents the HCI research community with design opportunities and challenges as well as future directions for PC&B-VR intervention design

Interactive Virtual Training: Implementation for Early Career Teachers to Practice Classroom Behavior Management

Teachers that are equipped with the skills to manage and prevent disruptive behaviors increase the potential for their students to achieve academically and socially. Student success increases when prevention strategies and effective classroom behavior management (CBM) are implemented in the classroom. However, teachers with less than 5 years of experience, early career teachers (ECTs), are ill equipped to handle disruptive students. ECTs describe disruptive behaviors as a major factor for stress given their limited training in CBM. As a result, disruptive behaviors are reported by ECTs as one of the main reasons for leaving the field. Virtual training environments (VTEs) combined with advances in virtual social agents can support the training of CBM. Although VTEs for teachers already exist, requirements to guide future research and development of similar training systems have not been defined. We propose a set of six requirements for VTEs for teachers. Our requirements were established from a survey of the literature and from iterative lifecycle activities to build our own VTE for teachers. We present different evaluations of our VTE using methodologies and metrics we developed to assess whether all requirements were met. Our VTE simulates interactions with virtual animated students based on real classroom situations to help ECTs practice their CBM. We enhanced our classroom simulator to further explore two aspects of our requirements: interaction devices and emotional virtual agents. Interactions devices were explored by comparing the effect of immersive technologies on users\u27 experience (UX) such as presence, co-presence, engagement and believability. We adapted our VTE originally built for desktop computer, to be compatible with two immersive VR platforms. Results show that our VTE generates high levels of UX across all VR platforms. Furthermore, we enhanced our virtual students to display emotions using facial expressions as current studies do not address whether emotional virtual agents provide the same level of UX across different VR platforms. We assessed the effects of VR platforms and display of emotions on UX. Our analysis shows that facial expressions have greater impact when using a desktop computer. We propose future work on immersive VTEs using emotional virtual agents

Towards an Effectve Arousal Detecton System for Virtual Reality

Immersive technologies offer the potential to drive engagement and create exciting experiences. A better understanding of the emotional state of the user within immersive experiences can assist in healthcare interventions and the evaluation of entertainment technologies. This work describes a feasibility study to explore the effect of affective video content on heart-rate recordings for Virtual Reality applications. A lowcost reflected-mode photoplethysmographic sensor and an electrocardiographic chest-belt sensor were attached on a novel non-invasive wearable interface specially designed for this study. 11 participants responses were analysed, and heart-rate metrics were used for arousal classification. The reported results demonstrate that the fusion of physiological signals yields to significant performance improvement; and hence the feasibility of our new approach

Playing With Embodied Social Interaction : A Thematic Review of Experiments on Social Aspects in Gameful Virtual Reality

Revision Published: 11 May 2022Recently, there has been a burgeoning of immersive virtual reality (VR) applications in a variety of shapes, including gameful social VR. Despite a longstanding tradition of studying social factors in gameful computing, this perspective in the specific experiences of VR is only gaining traction. This highly multidisciplinary area of interest is immensely complex with potential consequences on individuals and social groups alike. To aid in constituting and systematizing this area of research from the early days, this paper explores 14 state-of-art publications on experimental research of social aspects in gameful VR. These were analysed predominantly based on the included manipulations and the studied outcomes resulting in the extraction of five and seven thematic wholes, respectively. Finally, based on the findings, four broad avenues to consider were emphasized as suggested paths for a comprehensive future of embodied gameful social VR application and research across a variety of disciplines.Peer reviewe