Investigating the Relationship of Mental Immersion and Physiological Measures during Cloud Gaming

The ultimate goal of designing game applications is to evoke a state of mental immersion in human users. Recently, advancing and very promising cloud gaming services catch high interest of the research community and industry. Cloud gaming services reduce computational costs of a client by outsourcing the game logic and rendering to a remote server. Consequently, the degree to which a game runs smoothly and enables uninterrupted interaction depends on impairments of the network connection between client and server. Furthermore, the visibility of such impairments may be constrained by properties of the visual display at the client-side. The present paper investigates the impact of common network impairments (bit rate, delay, packet loss) and screen size (small, medium, large) on mental immersion. In addition to traditional subjective assessment using the Immersive Experience Questionnaire (IEQ), also less intrusive, continuous physiological methods are employed (electrocardiography, ECG; electro-dermal activity, EDA). Participants engaged in playing an action platform computer game under different combinations of network impairments and screen sizes. Results revealed a small main effect of screen size on gaming Quality of Experience and real-world dissociation ratings between the small and medium screen size. Effects of network impairments on all IEQ scales were significant and also manifested as increased heart rate variability for packet loss. Besides, positive correlations were found between IEQ scales and heart rate variability. These findings suggest that network impairments influencing gameplay interaction might be of higher importance for immersive experience than varying screen size. Heart rate variability shows promise as a useful ECG measure in future studies on gaming immersion.