An adoption model for virtual reality games: The roles of presence and enjoyment
Introduction
As virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) have become hot issues in user experience, the majority of global companies are rushing to explore these technologies and services in their business domains. Many global companies in the ICT (information and communication technology) field focus on VR and AR as their core areas of new business. According to Research and Markets (2017), the CAGR of global VR revenue is estimated to be 55% from 2018 to 2023. Moreover, the number of applications and software for VR has sharply increased while the cost of purchasing and using VR products and services has consistently decreased. In addition, the popularization of software and service platforms for supporting VR content productions promotes the distribution of the products and services. For instance, traditional content companies and several social networking services already provide 360-degree video and audio contents (Schütze and Irwin-Schütze, 2018). Manufacturers for VR devices, such as Sony, also produce a large number of games and contents through their own platforms.
Because VR technologies have a wide applicable industrial scope and growth potential, diverse industries such as e-commerce, real estate, and sports consider VR technologies as a usable service. One of these representative industries is the video game market (Fig. 1). Several reports have estimated that the video game market holds about 14% of the total global VR and AR markets with approximately 220 million users (Statistica, 2019). Representatively, there are many newly established cultural and entertainment experience spaces using VR games in South Korea (Chung et al., 2018).
Technically, the key characteristic of the user experience in VR technologies is the term “interactivity”, which supports the full range of sight with high-resolution visual effects and 3D sound through the user-subjective viewpoint (Seibert and Shafer, 2018, Sherman and Craig, 2018). Recently, a large number of companies, universities, and organizations have made enormous investments in VR technologies and services to improve the perceived level of interactivity among users, contents, attached sensors, and components (Jerald, 2015).
The overall direction of VR technologies has a notable tendency for users to feel greater levels of immersion and reality with authentic images that are generated by these technologies. In order to achieve this direction, scholars on VR technologies have recently aimed to improve the degree of technical presence (Sherman and Craig, 2018). However, there is no definitive research on the proportion between technical presence and users perceived degree of presence (Diemer et al., 2015). Although there have been several prior studies on empirical approaches that investigated whether technical affordance leads to a greater degree of users social presence (Schrock, 2015), the fundamental approaches on the technical, psychological, and cognitive motivations of presence and other outcomes in using VR technologies and services should be conducted.
The term “presence” is explained as “the subjective experience of being in a specific environment, even when one is not physically situated” (Slater, 1999). Considering VR technologies, the sense of presence can refer to users feelings of immersion and the experience in virtual environments fostered by VR technologies. Because users with a higher degree of presence feel like they are there, as presented and transported by VR technologies, they are more likely to feel immersed in the virtual environments by interacting with objects and characters.
Several prior studies on presence have argued that the characteristics of contents and users are notable influences of their perceived presence (Baños et al., 2004). After various interactive devices and services such as smart TVs were introduced, the differences between users perceived presence in traditional media channels and interactive devices have been explored (Bezjian-Avery et al., 1998). In particular, the focal point of these studies aims to investigate the motivations of users perceived presence and the mediating factors between motivations and presence (Baylor, 2009, Ozonur et al., 2018).
Despite the potential of VR technologies in the entertainment industry, user experience of VR entertainment contents has not been significantly explored. Because VR devices and services are currently and mainly employed by the early-adaptor group in the game industry (Coldham and Cook, 2017), investigating the early adaptors of VR games can promote VR technologies as one of the main streams in the industry. Thus, the current study aims to explore users’ perspectives toward VR games, focusing on their perceived presence, and to investigate the players’ motivations for playing. The current study proposes a research model for understanding users’ continual intention to play VR games. To achieve this purpose, the current study employs several potential motivations as key determinants of users’ continual intention to play the games through their perceived presence and enjoyment of the games. The findings and results of the current study can present several suggestions and implications to provide VR games that give players a better experience.
Section snippets
Presence
Most early studies on presence have indicated that the diffusion and applications of a specific technology can be facilitated when the significant motivations of users perceived presence can be identified and explored (Slater and Wilbur, 1997). Based on the origin definition of presence, the majority of previous studies on presence related to interactive media and technologies have defined the term presence as “the cognitive or psychological phenomena that a user is mediated and addicted in
Study method
Based on the employed constructs in the research model, the current study recruited 29 questionnaire items that were employed in previous related studies. Four professors in the fields of mobile services and communication studies considered and revised the items for VR games. Then, 22 graduate students who had experience in VR games took part in a pilot survey in order to eliminate the items that did not meet the reliability standards. With these procedures, 8 items were excluded, whereas 21
Reliability tests
The current study uses both confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and the structural equation modeling (SEM) method for investigating the proposed hypotheses and conducting the reliability tests. Previous studies proposed that more than 200 samples with Cronbachs alpha values and factor loading higher than 0.7 and composite reliability and average variance extracted (AVE) over 0.5 are required for the validity of CFA and the SEM method. Moreover, the square root values of AVE should not be lower
Discussion and conclusion
The current study employs three factors, perceived control, interactivity, and service and display quality, as notable motivational constructs for understanding VR game players continual intention to play through two moderators, perceived enjoyment and presence. Moreover, this study uses perceived cost as an additional determinant of the intention in order to contribute to the understanding and acceptance of VR games.
The results of the SEM method show that perceived control, interactivity and
Declaration of Competing Interest
There is no conflict of interest.
Acknowledgement
This work was supported by a National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korean government (MSIT) (NRF-2017R1C1B5017437).
References (72)
- et al.
Purchase behaviour determinants on online mobile game in indonesia
Int. J. Multicult. Multireligious Understand.
(2018) - et al.
On the evaluation of structural equation models
J. Acad. Market. Sci.
(1988) Effects of interactivity and product information on consumer satisfaction in an online retail setting
Int. J. Retail Distrib. Manage.
(2005)- et al.
Immersion and emotion: their impact on the sense of presence
Cyberpsychol. Behav.
(2004) Promoting motivation with virtual agents and avatars: role of visual presence and appearance
Philos. Trans. R. Soc. B
(2009)- et al.
Applying the technology acceptance model to vr with people who are favorable to its use
J. Cyber Ther. Rehab.
(2008) - et al.
New media interactive advertising vs. traditional advertising
J. Advertis. Res.
(1998) - et al.
Telepresence and video games: the impact of image quality
PsychNology J.
(2009) - et al.
Hedonic and utilitarian shopping goals: the online experience
J. Business Res.
(2008) - et al.
More breaks less presence