Evaluating the Effects of Visual Fidelity and Magnified View on User Experience in Virtual Reality Games

Virtual reality has been becoming more and more affordable in recent years. This led to more content, being specifically developed for this medium. Training with virtual reality is one of the promising areas in terms of the gained benefits. Virtual reality properties may affect usability and user performance, hence are important to understand well. This study aims at exploring effects of visual fidelity (high and low) and view zoom (normal and magnified) on user experience and task performance in virtual reality. Effects of visual fidelity have previously been explored but yielded different results based on the task design. Effects of view zoom on task performance hasn’t been explored yet, to our knowledge. A virtual reality inspection Digital Peer Publishing Licence Any party may pass on this Work by electronic means and make it available for download under the terms and conditions of the current version of the Digital Peer Publishing Licence (DPPL). The text of the licence may be accessed and retrieved via Internet at http://www.dipp.nrw.de/. First presented at the EuroVR Conference 2016, extended and revised for JVRB task was developed, and a user study was performed with 15 participants. Results indicated that low visual fidelity led to better task performance whereas view zoom did not have an effect on user performance. High visual fidelity increased level of presence and motion sickness whereas view zoom didn’t have an effect on these user experience aspects.