Sharing Manipulated Heart Rate Feedback in Collaborative Virtual Environments

We have explored the effects of sharing manipulated heart rate feedback in collaborative virtual environments. In our study, we created two types of different virtual environments (active and passive) with different levels of interactions and provided three levels of manipulated heart rate feedback (decreased, unchanged, and increased). We measured the effects of manipulated feedback on Social Presence, affect, physical heart rate, and overall experience. We noticed a significant effect of the manipulated heart rate feedback in affecting scariness and nervousness. The perception of the collaborator's valance and arousal was also affected where increased heart rate feedback perceived as a higher valance and lower arousal. Increased heart rate feedback decreased the real heart rate. The type of virtual environments had a significant effect on social presence, heart rate, and affect where the active environment had better performances across these measurements. We discuss the implications of this and directions for future research.