Human Influential Factors Assessment During At-Home Gaming with an Instrumented VR Headset
Marc-Antoine Moinnereau, Alcyr Alves de Oliveira, Tiago Henrique Falk · 2022
Human influential factors (HIFs) play a crucial role in a gamer's perceived immersive media experience, especially in virtual reality (VR) applications where cybersickness can be present. Typically, questionnaires have been used to gauge a gamer's experience focusing on factors such as sense of presence and engagement, to name a few. Questionnaires, however, can be time consuming and do not allow real-time assessment. To this end, affective/physiological computing tools have emerged as potential instrumental measures of HIFs. Affective tools, however, typically require the user to be in controlled laboratory settings. Therefore, the results may have limited transferability to everyday “in the wild” settings. This paper aims to fill this gap. First, we developed a plug-and-play instrumented VR headset capable of measuring multiple physiological signals, including electroencephalography (EEG), electrocardiography (ECG), and electro-oculography (EOG). Instrumented headsets were dropped off at the homes of eight novice VR gamers, together with a gaming laptop and a data streaming laptop, and players were asked to play Half-Life Alyx at the comfort of their homes. At the end of the game, users were asked to answer a questionnaire about their experience, including perceived sense of immersion, presence, emotions, realism, and engagement using 10- point scales. Several HIF biometrics were then extracted from the neurophysiological signals and shown to significantly correlate with the questions related to experience features. These findings suggest that real-time VR gamer experience measurement can be possible in highly ecological settings.