An Immersive Self-Report Tool for the Affective Appraisal of 360° VR Videos

Alexander Toet,Tina Mioch,Jan B F Van Erp,Fabienne Heijn,Anne-Marie Brouwer

doi:10.3389/frvir.2020.552587

Alexander Toet, Tina Mioch + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/frvir.2020.552587

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Abstract

Immersive 360◦ virtual reality (VR) movies can effectively evoke a wide range of different emotional experiences. To this end, they are increasingly deployed in entertainment, marketing and research. Because emotions influence decisions and behavior, it is important to assess the user’s affective appraisal of immersive 360◦ VR movies. Knowledge of this appraisal can serve to tune media content to achieve the desired emotional responses for a given purpose. To measure the affective appraisal of immersive VR movies, efficient immersive and validated instruments are required that minimally interfere with the VR experience itself. Here we investigated the convergent validity of a new efficient and intuitive graphical (emoji-based) affective self-report tool (the EmojiGrid) for the assessment of valence and arousal induced by videos representing 360◦ VEs (virtual environments). Thereto, 40 participants rated their emotional response (valence and arousal) to 62 videos from a validated public database of 360◦ VR movies using an EmojiGrid that was embedded in the VE, while we simultaneously assessed their autonomic physiological arousal through electrodermal activity. The mean affective ratings obtained with the EmojiGrid and those provided with the database (measured with an alternative and validated instrument) show excellent agreement for valence and good agreement for arousal. The mean arousal ratings obtained with the EmojiGrid also correlate strongly with autonomic physiological arousal. Thus, the EmojiGrid appears to be a valid and immersive affective self-report tool for measuring VE-induced emotions.

Highlights

Motivation of This StudyInteractive and immersive Virtual reality (VR) movies and virtual environments can effectively evoke a wide range of different emotions (Felnhofer et al, 2015; Ding et al, 2018; Chirico and Gaggioli, 2019)
We found that participants were able to intuitively use the EmojiGrid without any further explanation of the concepts of valence and arousal
They efficiently rated both valence and arousal by pointing a raycast beam onto an EmojiGrid that was embedded in the immersive virtual environment (VE) and clicking a response button

Summary

Introduction

Interactive and immersive VR movies and virtual environments can effectively evoke a wide range of different emotions (Felnhofer et al, 2015; Ding et al, 2018; Chirico and Gaggioli, 2019) As a result, these media are increasingly deployed in entertainment, marketing and research. These media are increasingly deployed in entertainment, marketing and research Despite their increasing popularity, it is still not clear how the VE content should be designed to achieve the desired emotional responses of users (Riva et al, 2007). To explore this relation, we need efficient and validated affective self-report instruments to measure the affective responses to VR experiences (Oliveira et al, 2018). Some typical features distinguishing 360◦ VR video from regular videos are a wide field-of-view (the extent of the observable part of the scene) and natural control over the viewing direction

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