Improvement of User Performance in Virtual Reality by Boosting Sense of Agency

Abstract

Virtual reality is a relatively new field of human activity that is seeing a greater influx of users in the recent years thanks to consumer versions of virtual reality head mounted display sets providing the necessary image fidelity for the early adopters. That being said, there are still several obstacles that virtual reality applications have to overcome in order for the user to finally accept it. While physiological complications like simulator sickness are a subject for medical students, the other issue, namely the uncanny valley or the acceptance problem is something purely technical. This paper reviews ways for improving user performance and engagement in virtual reality applications by addressing psychological aspects of the user to virtual environment interaction. The primary aspect is the sense of agency, which has been reviewed in detail and defined as a notion with complex structure. Its connections to sense of embodiment and sense of ownership have been reviewed and ways for their improvement were established. Sense of body ownership was reviewed and was proven as such that has no impact on user productivity. Thus, user avatar can be simplified without hindering the sense of agency. Each aspect or aspect group has been determined to have its ways for degradation and improvement. Additionally, several experiments have shown that user productivity and precision was positively influenced when they were presented with a higher fidelity simulation, resulting in a stronger sense of agency. While designing a better experience is a very application-specific task, creating a set of rules and a framework that enables these applications to follow a set of guidelines without developer effort is a universal notion. Framerate, image fidelity and avatar detail have been the primary target for methods of improvement: maximizing image fidelity while ignoring avatar detail and boosting framerate are all positively influencing the sense of agency and thus productivity. Lack of interruptions in input tracking also greatly improves the sense of agency, and hardware improvements are one of the methods of productivity boosting. To reach the set goals within reasonable hardware constraints however a foveated rendering method was suggested as a tool to optimally enhance the image fidelity based on recent findings about user’s peripheral vision in virtual reality.Ref. 19.