Interactive Gaming Reduces Experimental Pain With or Without a Head Mounted Display

While virtual reality environments have been shown to reduce pain, the precise mechanism that produces the pain attenuating effect has not been established. It has been suggested that it may be the ability to command attentional resources with the use of head mounted displays (HMDs) or the interactivity of the environment. Two experiments compared participants’ pain ratings to high and low levels of electrical stimulation while engaging in interactive gaming with an HMD. In the first, gaming with the HMD was compared to a positive emotion induction condition; and in the second experiment the HMD was compared to a condition in which the game was projected onto a wall. Interactive gaming significantly reduced numerical ratings of painful stimuli when compared to the baseline and affect condition. However, when the two gaming conditions were directly compared, they equally reduced participants’ pain ratings. These data are consistent with past research showing that interactive gaming can attenuate experimentally induced pain and its effects are comparable whether presented in a head mounted display or projected on a wall

Can a Virtual Cat Persuade You? The Role of Gender and Realism in Speaker Persuasiveness

This study examines the roles of gender and visual realism in the persuasiveness of speakers. Participants were presented with a persuasive passage delivered by a male or female person, virtual human, or virtual character. They were then assessed on attitude change and their ratings of the argument, message, and speaker. The results indicated that the virtual speakers were as effective at changing attitudes as real people. Male participants were more persuaded when the speaker was female than when the speaker was male, whereas female participants were more persuaded when the speaker was male than when the speaker was female. Cross gender interactions occurred across all conditions, suggesting that some of the gender stereotypes that occur with people may carry over to interaction with virtual characters. Ratings of the perceptions of the speaker were more favorable for virtual speakers than for human speakers. We discuss the application of these findings in the design of persuasive human computer interfaces

Look to go: An empirical evaluation of eye-based travel in virtual reality

We present two experiments evaluating the effectiveness of the eye as a controller for travel in virtual reality (VR). We used the FOVE head-mounted display (HMD), which includes an eye tracker. The first experiment compared seven different travel techniques to control movement direction while flying through target rings. The second experiment involved travel on a terrain: moving to waypoints while avoiding obstacles with three travel techniques. Results of the first experiment indicate that performance of the eye tracker with head-tracking was close to head motion alone, and better than eye-tracking alone. The second experiment revealed that completion times of all three techniques were very close. Overall, eye-based travel suffered from calibration issues and yielded much higher cybersickness than head-based approaches