VR Experience Research Articles

Virtual reality and tourism destinations marketing: can it transform travel? evaluating the impact of immersive experiences on travel intentions

ABSTRACT This study investigates the relationship between the immersive VR experience, destination cognitive image, destination affective image, and tourists’ travel intention. The sample of this research is 167 visitors of three tourist attractions of Isfahan Province in Iran, through 360-degree virtual reality videos. In order to collect research data, an online survey and convenience sampling methods were used. PLS-SEM was utilised to assess both the measurement and structural models. The findings indicated that among factors of external technical environment stimuli, media richness has a stronger effect on the formation of the destination's cognitive image than the affective image. Also, perceived interactivity compared to media richness has a significant impact on the formation of the destination's affective image. In addition, vision consistency as an internal technical environment stimulus has a positive effect on the formation of the cognitive and affective image of the destination. Finally, the affective image of the destination resulting from the immersive VR experience has a stronger effect on travel intention than the cognitive image.

Exploring students’ immersive VR experiences as resources for collaborative meaning making and learning

By adopting a situated and interactional approach, we explore students’ immersive VR experiences as resources for collaborative meaning making and learning. We draw on data from a project in which teachers and researchers co-developed a learning design for upper secondary students involving immersive VR technology. In this learning design, students viewed a cinematic VR film where they encountered different people telling personal stories about exclusion and discrimination, followed by reflective group dialogues with their teacher about their experiences in this environment. Through a detailed interaction analysis of these dialogues, we identify four dimensions that characterize students’ meaning making: (1) the feeling of taking part in conversations, (2) attending to bodily expressions of others, (3) students’ own bodily responses, (4) teacher guidance. We discuss how the findings from our analysis contribute to the field of CSCL, and which also have implications for instructional work that includes the use of immersive VR environments.

Immersive Experience and Virtual Reality

Much of the excitement about virtual reality and its potential for things like entertainment, art, education, and activism is its ability to generate experiences that are powerfully immersive. However, discussions of VR tend to invoke the notion of immersive experience without subjecting it to closer scrutiny; and discussions often take it for granted that immersive experience is a single unified phenomenon. Against this, we argue that there are four distinct types or aspects of immersive experience that should be distinguished: representational immersion, which corresponds roughly to what is sometimes called “psychological presence”; participatory immersion, which is related to the interactive aspects of VR experience; affective immersion, which has to do with the subject’s emotional relation to the experience; and narrative immersion, which captures the phenomenon of being caught up in the flow of events experienced. We argue that this four-way distinction helps us understand the powerfully immersive character of VR, while also recognizing its continuity with the immersion we experience with media such as novels, films, and music. We also argue that the account of immersion we offer here lets us better understand the connection between VR and empathy, charting a middle course between extreme enthusiasts who view VR as the ultimate “empathy machine” and extreme skeptics who argue that this attitude is misguided.

Development of Classifiers to Determine Factors Associated With Older Adult's Cognitive Functions and Game User Experience in VR Using Head Kinematics

Development of Classifiers to Determine Factors Associated With Older Adult's Cognitive Functions and Game User Experience in VR Using Head Kinematics

Authenticity and presence: defining perceived quality in VR experiences.

This work expands the existing understanding of quality assessments of VR experiences. Historically, VR quality has focused on presence and immersion, but current discourse emphasizes plausibility and believability as critical for lifelike, credible VR. However, the two concepts are often conflated, leading to confusion. This paper proposes viewing them as subsets of authenticity and presents a structured hierarchy delineating their differences and connections. Additionally, coherence and congruence are presented as complementary quality functions that integrate internal and external logic. The paper considers quality formation in the experience of authenticity inside VR emphasizing that distinguishing authenticity in terms of precise quality features are essential for accurate assessments. Evaluating quality requires a holistic approach across perceptual, cognitive, and emotional factors. This model provides theoretical grounding for assessing the quality of VR experiences.

Breaking the Isolation: Exploring the Impact of Passthrough in Shared Spaces on Player Performance and Experience in VR Exergames.

VR exergames offer an engaging solution to combat sedentary behavior and promote physical activity. However, challenges emerge when playing these games in shared spaces, particularly due to the presence of bystanders. VR's passthrough functionality enables players to maintain awareness of their surrounding environment while immersed in VR gaming, rendering it a promising solution to improve users' awareness of the environment. This study investigates the passthrough's impact on player performance and experiences in shared spaces, involving an experiment with 24 participants that examines Space (Office vs. Corridor) and Passthrough Function (With vs. Without). Results reveal that Passthrough enhances game performance and environmental awareness while reducing immersion. Players prefer an open area to an enclosed room, whether with or without Passthrough, finding it more socially acceptable. Additionally, Passthrough appears to encourage participation among players with higher self-consciousness, potentially alleviating their concerns about being observed by bystanders. Our findings provide valuable insights for designing VR experiences in shared spaces, underscoring the potential of VR's passthrough to enhance user experiences and promote VR adoption in these environments.

Personalized Feature Importance Ranking for Affect Recognition From Behavioral and Physiological Data

Designing affect-based personalized technology involves dealing with large datasets. Machine learning (ML) algorithms are employed to predict affect and similar human factors from in-game metrics, behavioral patterns, or physiological responses. The classification performance is usually presented as a global point estimate without providing user-specific interpretations. This approach is incompatible with effective personalization in games because it disregards the variability of body responses between players. This paper proposes a methodology to classify subjective human factors from large multimodal data. A public VR dataset (CEAP-360VR) was used to extensively compare three ML classifiers and five feature importance techniques. The produced models could reduce the original feature space by 82% (from 113 to 20 features) without compromising predictive performance (F1 score). A random forest (RF) using forward sequential feature selection (fSFS) yielded the best prediction of binary valence (F1=0.761) and arousal (F1=0.748). Finally, feature importance rankings are discussed with emphasis on global and user-specific patterns that may improve affect recognition. The proposed methodology is envisioned to help game designers and researchers create customized user-centric games and VR experiences inferring possible explanations from multimodal datasets.

The Least Increasing Aversion (LIA) Protocol: Illustration on Identifying Individual Susceptibility to Cybersickness Triggers.

This paper introduces the Least Increase aversion (LIA) protocol to investigate the relative impact of factors that may trigger cybersickness. The protocol is inspired by the Subjective Matching methodology (SMT) from which it borrows the incremental construction of a richer VR experience, except that the full-blown target experience may cause undesired discomfort. In the first session, the participant briefly encounter all factors at the maximum level. Then in the second session they start with the minimum level of all factors as a Baseline. Subsequently, we expect the participant to minimize their exposure to the most adverse factors. This approach ranks the factors from mildest to worst and helps detect individual susceptibility to cybersickness triggers.To validate the applicability of LIA protocol, we further evaluate it with an experiment to identify individual susceptibility to three rotational axes (Yaw, Pitch, and Roll). The findings not only confirm the protocol's capability to accurately discern individual rankings of various factors to cybersickness but also indicate that individual susceptibility is more intricate and multifaceted than initially anticipated.

F-RDW: Redirected Walking With Forecasting Future Position.

In order to serve better VR experiences to users, existing predictive methods of Redirected Walking (RDW) exploit future information to reduce the number of reset occurrences. However, such methods often impose a precondition during deployment, either in the virtual environment's layout or the user's walking direction, which constrains its universal applications. To tackle this challenge, we propose a mechanism F-RDW that is twofold: (1) forecasts the future information of a user in the virtual space without any assumptions by using the conventional method, and (2) fuse this information while maneuvering existing RDW methods. The backbone of the first step is an LSTM-based model that ingests the user's spatial and eye-tracking data to predict the user's future position in the virtual space, and the following step feeds those predicted values into existing RDW methods (such as MPCRed, S2C, TAPF, and ARC) while respecting their internal mechanism in applicable ways. The results of our simulation test and user study demonstrate the significance of future information when using RDW in small physical spaces or complex environments. We prove that the proposed mechanism significantly reduces the number of resets and increases the traveled distance between resets, hence augmenting the redirection performance of all RDW methods explored in this work. Our project and dataset are available at https://github.com/YonseiCGnA-VR/F-RDW.

Come Look at This: Supporting Fluent Transitions between Tightly and Loosely Coupled Collaboration in Social Virtual Reality.

Collaborative work in social virtual reality often requires an interplay of loosely coupled collaboration from different virtual locations and tightly coupled face-to-face collaboration. Without appropriate system mediation, however, transitioning between these phases requires high navigation and coordination efforts. In this paper, we present an interaction system that allows collaborators in virtual reality to seamlessly switch between different collaboration models known from related work. To this end, we present collaborators with functionalities that let them work on individual sub-tasks in different virtual locations, consult each other using asymmetric interaction patterns while keeping their current location, and temporarily or permanently join each other for face-to-face interaction. We evaluated our methods in a user study with 32 participants working in teams of two. Our quantitative results indicate that delegating the target selection process for a long-distance teleport significantly improves placement accuracy and decreases task load within the team. Our qualitative user feedback shows that our system can be applied to support flexible collaboration. In addition, the proposed interaction sequence received positive evaluations from teams with varying VR experiences.

Development of a VR Experience System for Flood Inundation Situations

Development of a VR Experience System for Flood Inundation Situations

USING VIRTUAL REALITY IN LONG-TERM CARE TO REDUCE SOCIAL ISOLATION

Abstract Virtual Reality (VR) has become increasingly accessible for older adults, providing opportunities for interventions that address loneliness and social isolation in long-term care. However, the effectiveness of VR programs can be influenced by various factors, such as the backgrounds, preferences, and capacities of the target population. This qualitative study investigates the acceptability and feasibility of a recreational VR program for social engagement in two Canadian long-term care homes since January 2023. The study involved 20 residents (with various levels of cognitive and physical impairments) who participated in weekly VR group sessions facilitated by staff. Ethnographic observation and video-recorded conversational interviews were conducted with residents during the VR sessions. We also conducted 10 focus groups with 20 staff members. Four patient partners were involved as co-researchers in the team. We performed the thematic analysis with patient partners. We identified three themes: (1) storytelling builds residents’ sense of self, (2) positive emotions persist even when the video is forgotten, and (3) VR empowers resident-resident and staff-resident connections. The findings demonstrate that using VR in long-term care settings is feasible and acceptable for older adults with different cognitive and physical impairments. VR programs have the potential to enhance social engagement and support residents’ personhood as a meaningful activity by improving inclusion, social engagement, comfort, and recognition of their identity. Future research could explore the long-term impact of VR experiences in addressing social isolation and loneliness among older adults in long-term care.

The impact of sound and immersive experience on learners when using virtual reality and tablet: A mixed‐method study

Multisensory‐rich VR experiences, which encompass visual, auditory, and haptic stimuli, have the potential to enhance engagement, motivation, and learning. However, extensive sensory stimuli could also compromise learning through sensory overload. In museum settings, visitors who are inundated with excessive stimuli such as unrelated background music or competing visual options may not experience optimal learning. This mixed‐methods study addressed this potential problem by exploring the impact of sound on learning, enjoyment, sense of presence, and the development of interest among museum attendees (N = 255) who used two different types of technology: high‐immersion VR or a tablet. Results from a one‐way MANOVA revealed that learning and sense of presence were unaffected by the technology used unless sound was added. Using a tablet with sound lowered the sense of presence. Participants in the VR condition with or without sound had significantly higher enjoyment scores than those in either tablet condition. The development of interest was not significantly affected by any condition, regardless of whether sound was used. The research findings have implications for implementing VR for learning in museum settings. For instance, VR can enhance a sense of presence in museum exhibits, but a sense of presence may be significantly diminished when museum visitors use tablets with sound. Additional recommendations for the use of multimodal VR in museums are provided. Practitioner notesWhat is already known about this topic VR can support an immersive and engaging experience for users. VR is more immersive than tablets. When designed effectively, sound can increase immersion and engagement. When integrated into the visual environment, sound can add authenticity to the learning content. VR can complement museum exhibits as it allows museum visitors to extend their learning experiences. What this paper adds VR enriched with sound can significantly and positively impact sense of presence. Compared with a soundless VR exhibition, VR enriched with sound enhances engagement of museum visitors by drawing their attention to the content of the exhibits. VR with and without sound can support learning and add enjoyment to museum visitor experiences. Implications for practice and/or policy Developers interested in adding sound to VR should ensure that the visual and auditory experiences are directly related to the desired content delivery. Museum exhibit creators and curators should consider the use of VR to provide dynamic learning experiences that increase enjoyment and presence.

Developing an immersive gamification technology system for the management of patients with behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia (Phase 1 trial)

AbstractBackgroundVirtual reality (VR) technology has been increasingly used in the management of people living with dementia, serving as a novel and important non‐pharmacologic approach to address the complex behavioral and psychological symptoms. The objective of this phase 1 study was to develop an immersive gamification technology system (ImGTS), specifically, a VR application, and describe its acceptability, usability, and safety in a cohort of healthy adults.MethodThe development of ImGTS included software and hardware designs appropriate for the local context and tested using two distinct set‐ups: head‐mounted display (HMD) and the Semi‐Cave automatic virtual environment (Semi‐CAVE). Qualitative and quantitative data questionnaires, with responses analyzed using thematic analysis and descriptive statistics were used to measure the sense of place, usability and safety of the two set‐ups.ResultParticipants who used the HMD (n = 15) and the Semi‐CAVE (n = 15) had positive impressions and clear recollections of the VR experience. Incidence of VR sickness symptoms was low, and the mean total VR sickness scores decreased across sessions. Participants in both groups were able to perform key tasks in the VR experience, and the majority performed these actions with ease by the final testing session (n = 15 for the HMD, n = 13 for the Semi‐CAVE). The three main activities were given a ‘neutral to positive’ description in terms of satisfaction.ConclusionThe technology we developed had a considerable level of impact in eliciting important aspects of cognition and emotion. Through self‐reported measures and researcher observations, we found that the HMD and Semi‐CAVE VR setups were safe, acceptable and usable by healthy adult participants.

Proposal of reverberation time to match the visual aspect of the architectural space displayed in VR using panoramic photographs

Most VR applications in the field of architecture are based on visual information only, and the addition of auditory information is expected to provide a more realistic representation. In order to provide a comfortable VR experience, discomfort due to inconsistencies between visual and auditory information should not occur. The aim of this study is to propose a reverberation time that matches the visual aspect of the architectural space displayed in VR using panoramic photographs. Subjective experiments were conducted on 15 virtual spaces created from panoramic photographs of architectural spaces to determine a reverberation time that matches the visual aspect of these spaces and to subjectively evaluate the visual impressions. Based on the results, several models of reverberation time to match the visual aspect of the architectural space displayed in VR using panoramic photographs were created. The results of this experiment showed that the model using the volume of the virtual spaces was appropriate.

Infrastructures for Digital Arts Teaching and Research in Higher Education (LeFo): The “Connecting New Media Art Archives Worldwide” Initiative

The project titled “Infrastructures for Digital Arts Teaching and Research in Higher Education” (LeFo) funded by the BMBWF between 2020 and 2024 is being carried out at the University of Continuing Education Krems, the University of Arts Linz and the University of Applied Arts Vienna. In addition to the expansion of the Archive of Digital Art (ADA) for research and teaching at universities and the development of innovative New Media Art documentation with VR and mixed-reality experiences, the project supports the establishment of a global network of New Media Art archives. This paper focuses on the (pre)history, special challenges and selected solution approaches of the initiative to date.

Salient features and emotions elicited from a virtual reality experience: the immersive Van Gogh exhibition

AbstractThis research is based on the cognitive-affective-conative model applied to the online reviews posted by visitors of a tourist attraction titled “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience” held in York (UK). The goals of the study specifically focus on the identification of the cognitive features triggered using the VR device and on the understanding of sentiments and emotions activated by the VR experience. To this end, Text mining and Sentiment analysis have been utilised. This work extends prior studies on VR based on surveys by providing a comprehensive hybrid view of how knowledge is derived from the posted online reviews. The findings offer practitioner insights into the cognitive and affective aspect of the VR experience, which requires special attention for its adaptation so that it continues meeting visitors’ expectations.

Bursting into the Image: Towards De-automatization in VR

The art installation Osmose (1995) by Char Davies, one of the most widely discussed media art projects, will be explored in relation to the notion of de-automatization. The de-automatized experience in Osmose will be developed by looking at theories of perception by Arthur Deikman and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as George Stratton’s inverse goggle experiment, Bernard Stiegler’s account of automation, and Gilles Deleuze’s writings on the virtual. The article traces a double act of de-automatization in Davies’ Osmose that occurs due to the indeterminate object relations in the multi-media installation on the one hand, and their intertwinement with the organic sensing body on the other. This leads to an ungearing of one’s habitual perception, that produces a particular relation with the virtual dimension. By outlining the theoretical framework of the intertwining between technical object and bodily experience in Osmose, it becomes possible to speculate on the trajectory of contemporary VR experiences. Whilst the contemporary VR scene still relies heavily on the privileging of the visual dimension, the project We Live in an Ocean of Air by Marshmallow Laser Feast shows how VR environments can ‘leverage on’ emerging technologies to re-produce nuanced deautomatized experiences. De-automatization unravels how the reception of the deautomatized VR image reframes relations between actual and virtual.

Interactive Virtual Reality with Educational Feedback Loops to Train and Assess Veterinary Students on the Use of Anesthetic Machine.

The study objective was to assess acceptability, feasibility, likeability, and applicability of interactive virtual reality with feedback loops (VR) to teach and assess veterinary anesthesia machine operation. Data from 60 students were analyzed. Students learned and trained how to use the anesthesia machine components and connections and performed safety checks (such as the pressure check) using real and VR machines. Competency was assessed with oral/practical and VR exams. A questionnaire survey gathered student affective skill perception toward VR for education. Students perceived VR for veterinary education as positive, useful, likeable, and helpful to learn the anesthesia machine. VR appeared to increase cognitive load, inducing lower VR exam scores of 100 (92.4-97.9) when compared to oral/practical exams of 100 (98-99.8) with p = .018. Training times with either real or VR anesthesia machines were similar (p = .71). A positive correlation was found between VR training times and VR exam scores (Spearman's correlation coefficient 0.5; p < .001). No correlations were identified between oral/practical exam scores and training times. Seventy two percent of the students (n = 43) had never used VR before. Prior VR experience was not necessary to train using VR. Computer glitches and cybersickness are important drawbacks to consider when using VR for education. The study demonstrated that interactive, immersive VR received favorable reactions from students. The VR incorporated educational feedback loops can be utilized as a simulation trainer for veterinary education. However, inherent limitations should be considered.

A Perceptual Measure for Deep Single Image Camera and Lens Calibration.

Image editing and compositing have become ubiquitous in entertainment, from digital art to AR and VR experiences. To produce beautiful composites, the camera needs to be geometrically calibrated, which can be tedious and requires a physical calibration target. In place of the traditional multi-image calibration process, we propose to infer the camera calibration parameters such as pitch, roll, field of view, and lens distortion directly from a single image using a deep convolutional neural network. We train this network using automatically generated samples from a large-scale panorama dataset, yielding competitive accuracy in terms of standard l2 error. However, we argue that minimizing such standard error metrics might not be optimal for many applications. In this work, we investigate human sensitivity to inaccuracies in geometric camera calibration. To this end, we conduct a large-scale human perception study where we ask participants to judge the realism of 3D objects composited with correct and biased camera calibration parameters. Based on this study, we develop a new perceptual measure for camera calibration and demonstrate that our deep calibration network outperforms previous single-image based calibration methods both on standard metrics as well as on this novel perceptual measure. Finally, we demonstrate the use of our calibration network for several applications, including virtual object insertion, image retrieval, and compositing.