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Pushing Yourself to the Limit - Influence of Emotional Virtual Environment Design on Physical Training in VR

Published: 19 November 2024 Publication History

Abstract

The design of virtual environments (VEs) can strongly influence users’ emotions. These VEs are also an important aspect of immersive Virtual Reality (VR) exergames – training system that can inspire athletes to train in a highly motivated way and achieve a higher training intensity. VR-based training and rehabilitation systems can increase a user’s motivation to train and to repeat physical exercises. The surrounding VE can potentially predominantly influence users’ motivation and hence potentially even physical performance. Besides providing potentially motivating environments, physical training can be enhanced by gamification. However, it is unclear whether the surrounding VE of a VR-based physical training system influences the effectiveness of gamification. We investigate whether an emotional positive or emotional negative design influences the sport performance and interacts with the positive effects of gamification. In a user study, we immerse participants in VEs following either an emotional positive, neutral, or negative design and measure the duration the participants can hold a static strength-endurance exercise. The study targeted the investigation of the effects of (1) emotional VE design as well as the (2) presence and absence of gamification. We did not observe significant differences in the performance of the participants independent of the conditions of VE design or gamification. Gamification caused a dominating effect on emotion and motivation over the emotional design of the VEs, thus indicating an overall positive impact. The emotional design influenced the participants’ intrinsic motivation but caused mixed results with respect to emotion. Overall, our results indicate the importance of using gamification and support the commonly used emotional positive VEs for physical training. They further indicate that the design space could also include other emotional directions of VE design.

Supplemental Material

Emotional Negative VE
Supplementary Material for Pushing Yourself to the Limit - Influence of Emotional Virtual Environment Design on Physical Training in VR

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  1. Pushing Yourself to the Limit - Influence of Emotional Virtual Environment Design on Physical Training in VR

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      Published In

      cover image Games: Research and Practice
      Games: Research and Practice  Volume 2, Issue 4
      December 2024
      74 pages
      EISSN:2832-5516
      DOI:10.1145/3613747
      • Editor:
      • Sebastian Deterding
      Issue’s Table of Contents

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      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 19 November 2024
      Online AM: 28 September 2024
      Accepted: 30 July 2024
      Revised: 21 June 2024
      Received: 11 July 2023
      Published in GAMES Volume 2, Issue 4

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      1. Virtual environments
      2. exergame
      3. virtual reality
      4. emotions

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