Enjoyment in VR games : factors, challenges, and simulator sickness mitigation techniques

• Main Author: Vilela Monteiro, Diego
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: University of Liverpool 2021
• DOI: 10.17638/03125747

Although Virtual Reality (VR) has been developed for a while, the last decade has seen a surge in its popularity with the advent of commercial VR Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs), making the technology more accessible. One field that significantly benefits from VR is the entertainment industry, for example, games. Games can be challenging to design as they involve several components that are found in other types of applications as well, such as presentation, navigation, interaction with virtual agents, and in-game measurements. Despite recent advances, the optimal configurations for game applications in VR are still widely unexplored. In this thesis, we propose to fill this gap by a series of studies that analyse different components involved in making VR applications more enjoyable. We propose studying three characteristics that are heavily influential in game enjoyment (1) the aesthetical realism and emotions of virtual agents; (2) viewing perspective (First-Person Perspective and Third-Person Perspective), its influence on subjective feelings and how to measure those feelings; and (3) how to reduce or eliminate VR Sickness without affecting the experience (or affecting it positively). Our results showed that Virtual Agents' facial expressions are one of the most important aspects to be considered. On the second topic, we have observed that viewing perspective is influential on VR Sickness; however, other subjective feelings were challenging to measure in this context. On the last topic, we analysed existing tendencies in Simulator Sickness mitigation techniques that do not affect in-game mechanics and present a novel solution that has a good trade-off between mitigating VR Sickness and maintaining or enhancing immersion and performance. Finally, we propose some guidelines based on our results.