Abstract
With the rising popularity of VR technologies, more people are experiencing what this medium has to offer. Right now, the most popular games are either single-player or online-multiplayer, leaving the people in the same room without a way of interacting with the HMD (Head Mounted Display) player. For VR to become mainstream, this problem has to be solved. A preliminary experiment was conducted in which two different ways of including a second person in the VR experience (through a PC or a Phone) were compared in terms of co-presence and immersion. Results showed that both ways are valid and can be used to add a second player — the quantitative data gathered from two surveys (Networked Minds Measure of Social Presence for co-presence and iGroup Presence Questionnaire for Immersion) showed that there was no significant difference, and the qualitative data, which revealed 13 distinct themes divided into five categories, helped with understanding the survey results. The next steps are to concentrate on one of the categories (embodiment) and conducting a systematic review into ways of increasing it, followed by expert interviews to confirm the findings and create a definitive list of factors that affect embodiment. Finally, a second experiment will be conducted in order to confirm the validity of the factors.
This was part of the Doctoral Consortium of CHI PLAY in 2020, in which a short summary of the work that was done and the future direction of my PhD was discussed, as well as a short 5 minute video that was presented at the online conference.
Yoan-Daniel Malinov
PhD Student in Computer Science
Interested in Virtual Reality, multi-modal play and Game Development.