Leveraging Distraction to Quantify Immersion
Payne, Emily A.
2022
-
Understanding immersion is crucial to opening the virtual reality (VR) world and discovering its many implications on our lives. Immersion is defined as the extent that virtual environments submerge users’ perceptual systems, shut out the physical environments’ inputs, and induce engrossment in users. Previous studies have attempted to understand this phenomenon via secondary tasks and subjective ... read moremeasures, but they have yielded conflicting and inconsistent results. The present study sought to further understand immersion’s applications in virtual environments by aiming to leverage distraction to quantify immersion objectively. We hypothesized that participants in immersive VR would have impaired responses to a secondary, non-VR task compared to those experiencing a 2-dimensional version of VR. Using a within-subjects design, participants viewed a VR meditation both on a computer screen (2D) and through a VR headset (3D). During the meditations, they completed a secondary detection-response task (DRT) by pressing a button in response to a tactile stimulus. We sought to utilize DRT reaction times to objectively measure immersion. Following the meditations, participants completed surveys regarding their experiences. Results concluded that there was no significant effect of VR on DRT performance. However, overall DRT performance was worse in the 3D VR, paralleling survey results that the 3D condition increased mental workload, engagement, and presence. Several factors, including the meditation potentially increasing body awareness, could have yielded these insignificant results, and further data collection and exploration are required to solidify conclusions and increase our understanding of immersion.
Thesis (B.S.)--Tufts University, 2022.
Submitted to the Dept. of Psychology.
Keywords: Virtual reality, Immersion, Presence, Secondary task, Detection response task.read less - ID:
- gq67k6273
- To Cite:
- TARC Citation Guide EndNote
- Usage:
- Detailed Rights
