Motivation and high effort in exergames are still open to optimization. In reality, coaches can stimulate athletes' engagement by infecting them with their emotions. However, whether these emotion-influencing effects also occur with virtual coaches remains unclear. In the present study, we measured the emotional state, motivation, and performance (punch speed) of 47 participants playing a VR exergame with an emotional (happy/angry) or neutral virtual coach. Results show that the happy and angry coach significantly affected the players' emotions. Furthermore, interacting with the emotional coaches leads to higher motivation, whereas the angry coach causes a reduction of feeling related. Also, we found a significant positive correlation between the increase in anger and punch speed. Our results show that adding an emotional component to virtual coaches into exergames is promising for increasing motivation and performance. This study highlights the positive effects of emotional virtual characters for improving VR exergames and, therefore, players' health.

Exergames can increase cognitive performance compared to sedentary games and the same non-gamified exercise. Whether this advantage can be further enhanced by the high immersion and arousal level VR systems offer remains unclear. Therefore, we developed an exergame that can be played in VR or in front of a TV screen with identical gameplay in both versions. In a study with 32 participants, we collected data on cognitive performance, arousal, presence, motivation, and exertion. Our results show no difference in cognitive performance and arousal between the conditions. However, the VR version significantly increased players' presence and motivation while significantly reducing perceived exertion. Our results help to understand in which aspects VR can have a significant impact on exergames.

Research on VR Exergaming is mostly conducted with participants who are not presented a choice whether or not to play the exergame and thus to perform a certain strenuous activity. Whether players would engage in such activity if it were optional and how they could be motivated to do so is mostly neglected. Therefore, we have developed a novel controller and implemented a VR exergame that utilizes Virtual Performance Augmentation (VPA) to motivate players to engage in an optional strenuous activity. The motivational impact of three different conditions (VPA vs. Points vs. No Motivator) was evaluated in a study with 47 participants. Our results suggest that using VPA can significantly increase the time the players engage in the strenuous activity enriched by VPA, while in contrast to our hypotheses, no significant differences for the players' enjoyment and perceived exertion between the conditions were found. We discuss our findings in the context of motivation, exertion, and the resulting implications for further VR exergames research.

Virtual Reality (VR) exergaming is a beneficial and promising approach resulting from the combination of physical activity with the high motivation and enjoyment immersive VR offers. However, exergames can often fail to reach suggested levels of exertion. We, therefore, integrated a heavy passive haptic controller into a VR exergame. We explore the impact of the passive haptic controller and different kinds of kinesthetic feedback resulting from different interactions on the player experience. Our results of an extensive study (N=82) suggest, that using a heavy controller can significantly increase the exertion without reducing the motivation in contrast to using an HTC Vive controller. We discuss this finding in the context of haptic feedback and the experience of presence and the resulting implications for further research and VR exergames.

Our research investigates the role of physical co-presence for the experience of multiplayer cooperation in virtual reality (VR). We developed and compared a shared-room (co-located) and separated-room (remote) version of a cooperative two-player VR game. In an extensive study (N=92) we assessed measures of task awareness and spatial presence, as well as player communication, interaction, and performance. Our results indicate that players sharing the same physical space tend to neglect the cooperative task. Moreover, our results indicate that being physically separated can beneficially impact the perceived cooperative social presence, quality of communication, and performance in contrast to sharing a physical space. The role of physical co-location in room-scale VR and potential confounding effects caused by it, as well as implications for further research, are discussed.

This paper presents the ongoing work on a technological pipeline to automate the recording and analysis of player speech data in the evaluation of player experience. The pipeline generates a heatmap that visualizes where the players in the virtual environment have made positive, negative, and neutral statements. Moreover, the heatmap provides spatiotemporal information of in-game events, as well as interactive features like filters and modifiers. We describe how the pipeline is set up for the Unity game engine, how we implemented the sentiment classification module as well as the visualization of the tracked data. Concluding, we define goals for further development.