Effects of voluntary heart rate control on user engagement and agency in a virtual reality game
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Effects of voluntary heart rate control on user engagement and agency in a virtual reality game Samory Houzangbe1 · Olivier Christmann1 · Geoffrey Gorisse1 · Simon Richir1 Received: 1 March 2019 / Accepted: 22 February 2020 © Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract It has been demonstrated that virtual reality (VR) exposure can affect the subjective experience of different situations, cognitive capabilities or behavior. It is known that there is a link between a person’s physiological state and their psychological self-report and user experience. As an immersive experience can affect users’ physiological data, it is possible to adapt and enhance the content of a virtual environment in real-time base on physiological data feedback (biofeedback). With the rapid evolution of the physiological monitoring technologies, it is now possible to exploit different modalities of biofeedback, in a cheap and non-cumbersome manner, and study how they can affect user experience. While most of the studies involving physiological data use it as a measuring tool, we want to study its impact when direct and voluntary physiological control becomes a mean of interaction. To do so, we created a two-parts protocol. The first part was designed to categorize the participants on their heart rate control competency. In the second part of the study, we immersed our participants in a VR experience where they must control their heart rate to interact with the elements in the game. The results were analyzed based on the competency distribution. We observed consistent results between our competency scale and the participants’ control of the biofeedback game mechanic. We also found that our direct biofeedback mechanic is highly engaging. We observed that it generated a strong feeling of agency, which is linked with users’ level of heart rate control. We highlighted the richness of biofeedback as a direct game mechanic, prompting interesting perspective for personalized immersive experiences. Keywords Virtual reality · Biofeedback · User engagement · Agency · User study
1 Introduction Using physiological data to influence an interactive experience is called biofeedback, which is simply defined by Riedl et al. (2014) as “systems that recognize the physiological state of the user and that adapt, based on that information, in real-time.” The usage of physiology in virtual reality (VR) has been studied in order to bring more out of the experience (Muñoz et al. 2016; Dey et al. 2017). If the general * Samory Houzangbe [email protected] Olivier Christmann [email protected] Geoffrey Gorisse [email protected] Simon Richir [email protected] 1
Arts et Metiers Institute of Technology, LAMPA, HESAM Université, 53810 Change, France
consensus seems to point toward the fact that the usage of physiological biofeedback can increase user engagement in VR experiences, it has some limitations when it is not fully taken into account (Dekker and Champion 2007; Houzangbe et al. 2018a). Most
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