An Analysis of Physiological and Psychological Responses in Virtual Reality and Flat Screen Gaming

TL;DR

This study systematically compares physiological and emotional responses in VR and flat screen gaming, revealing VR induces stronger emotions, higher arousal, and greater stress, with a new dataset made publicly available.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive analysis of physiological and emotional differences between VR and FS gaming using multimodal data and introduces a new publicly accessible dataset.

Findings

VR gaming elicits more intense emotions and higher arousal.

VR increases cognitive load and stress compared to FS.

VR gaming results in lower dominance feelings.

Abstract

Recent research has focused on the effectiveness of Virtual Reality (VR) in games as a more immersive method of interaction. However, there is a lack of robust analysis of the physiological effects between VR and flatscreen (FS) gaming. This paper introduces the first systematic comparison and analysis of emotional and physiological responses to commercially available games in VR and FS environments. To elicit these responses, we first selected four games through a pilot study of 6 participants to cover all four quadrants of the valence-arousal space. Using these games, we recorded the physiological activity, including Blood Volume Pulse and Electrodermal Activity, and self-reported emotions of 33 participants in a user study. Our data analysis revealed that VR gaming elicited more pronounced emotions, higher arousal, increased cognitive load and stress, and lower dominance than FS gaming. The Virtual Reality and Flat Screen (VRFS) dataset, containing over 15 hours of multimodal data comparing FS and VR gaming across different games, is also made publicly available for research purposes. Our analysis provides valuable insights for further investigations into the physiological and emotional effects of VR and FS gaming.