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