Vanishing Importance: Studying Immersive Effects of Game Audio Perception on Player Experiences in Virtual Reality
Katja Rogers, Giovanni Ribeiro, Rina Wehbe, Michael Weber, and Lennart Nacke. 2018. Vanishing Importance: Studying Immersive Effects of Game Audio Perception on Player Experiences in Virtual Reality. In Proceeding of the 2018 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI 2018. Montreal, QC, Canada. ACM, 328. doi:10.1145/3173574.3173902
Abstract
Sound and virtual reality (VR) are two important output modalities for creating an immersive player experience (PX). While prior research suggests that sounds might contribute to a more immersive experience in games played on screens and mobile displays, there is not yet evidence of these effects of sound on PX in VR. To address this, we conducted a within-subjects experiment using a commercial horror-adventure game to study the effects of a VR and monitor-display version of the same game on PX. Subsequently, we explored, in a between-subjects study, the effects of audio dimensionality on PX in VR. Results indicate that audio has a more implicit influence on PX in VR because of the impact of the overall sensory experience and that audio dimensionality in VR may not be a significant factor contributing to PX. Based on our findings and observations, we provide five design guidelines for VR games.