Virtual reality (VR) is reshaping tourism as museums increasingly adopt it to create immersive visitor experiences. While presence is key to VR effectiveness, little is known about how interaction modes affect it. This study examines the impact of two elements −guidance and spatial mobility− on perceived presence in virtual museum visits. It also explores the psychological mechanisms involved and identifies autonomy as a positive driver and satiation as a limiting factor. Results show that guidance enhances presence although it slightly reduces autonomy, while spatial mobility has less of an effect. In turn, presence boosts perceived entertainment and informativeness and positively influences attitudes toward the destination and visit intention. This research helps to understand how interaction design in immersive environments shapes user experience and behaviour. It offers theoretical insights on presence drivers as well as practical implications for creating more effective, satisfying, and wellbeing-oriented VR experiences in tourism.

With the parallel advancement and evolution of psycho-physiological sensors, haptics, and overall wearable computing, wearable devices have become a mainstay in everyday life. While gaming is one of the most intuitively appealing areas for using wearable devices, most gaming concepts relying on wearable devices have had only moderate success. Therefore, further knowledge is needed by game developers for innovating new gaming concepts, by wearable designers to innovate new affordances for gaming in wearables, and by gamers for seeing the possibilities of what wearables can bring to gaming. To address this research problem, we combined vignette and survey studies (N = 289) to investigate which features of wearables (integrability, wearability, modularity, sociability, programmability, bio-adaptability, audiovisuality, and embodied modality) would lead to gameful experiences. Overall, the results indicate that integrability to games, wearability, modularity, and sociability were dimensions of wearables which were most strongly connected with the expectation of a heightened game experience. The findings of the study contribute to the current understanding on the experiential value of gaming wearables, as well as providing practical guidance for gaming wearables designers and marketers.

Recent studies on gaming wearables show that wearables can contribute to the gaming experience by bolstering performativity, facilitating social interaction, and accommodating distinct interaction modalities. Still, these studies focused on contexts such as role-playing, casual, or festival games. Stakeholder-oriented research that explores the integration of wearables for mainstream gaming platforms such as game consoles is scarce. To fill this gap, we have conducted an exploratory study through 6 participatory design workshops focusing on different aspects of wearables with 33 participants from different stakeholders. As a result, we have created fifteen design themes and three gaming wearable concepts that led to seven actionable design implications which can be adopted by designers and researchers for designing gaming wearables.

Gamification is increasingly employed in learning environments as a way to increase student motivation and consequent learning outcomes. However, while the research on the effectiveness of gamification in the context of education has been growing, there are blind spots regarding which types of gamification may be suitable for different educational contexts. This study investigates the effects of the challenge-based gamification on learning in the area of statistics education. We developed a gamification approach, called Horses for Courses, which is composed of main game design patterns related to the challenge-based gamification; points, levels, challenges and a leaderboard. Having conducted a 2 (read: yes vs. no) x 2 (gamification: yes vs. no) between-subject experiment, we present a quantitative analysis of the performance of 365 students from two different academic majors: Electrical and Computer Engineering (n=279), and Business Administration (n=86). The results of our experiments show that the challenge-based gamification had a positive impact on student learning compared to traditional teaching methods (compared to having no treatment and treatment involving reading exercises). The effect was larger for females or for students at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.