Despite the long history of virtual reality (VR) technology and its current availability, it remains unclear how the general public perceives and uses the technology. To shed light on this, we conducted a panel survey with 931 respondents in the spring of 2021. The survey revealed that while most people knew what VR is, only 20% had tried it; even among the age groups below 40 years, the share with VR experience ranged from 34 to 54%. Moreover, the vast majority were infrequent users, only 0.6% of the full sample used VR weekly. Reasons provided for not trying VR were mainly related to either lack of interest or lack of opportunity, while infrequent usage seemed to be linked to poor user experience. User experience was in turn tied to sound and image quality, novelty, usability, content, responsiveness and cybersickness symptoms such as vertigo and nausea. This suggests that those who are already familiar with VR require high technical quality as well as high creative quality if they are to adopt VR as a consumer technology.

Video games have become an integral part of people’s lives. However, visually impaired players are usually unable to navigate current games. The goal of this research is to help visually impaired people navigate 3D games while also maintaining immersion. In the future, we hope to create a plug-in for game engines such as Unreal Engine and Unity that will be used by the game industry to easily make their game accessible to visually impaired players. This demo shows an early iteration of this concept. The goal is to gather input from the interactive media experience community on how to proceed with this process.

This paper presents the finding of a subjective study investigating the impact of delay on a VR gaming experience, applying an experimental design to a virtual game of squash. 32 participants were asked to rate the stability of the VR experience while playing the game, with results showing an impact of delay even at the lowest level of 20 ms added delay. With 120 ms added delay, most participants judged the experience to be fully unstable. Exploring individual differences, we also found that males and experienced gamers were more critical, or more sensitive, to higher levels of delay, compared to females and less experienced gamers.

When software and hardware processes cause delay between an input and an output, consequences can be both harmful and annoying. In games, this type of delay can cause actions to lag behind a player's inputs. Studies on delayed game actions show negative impact on both player performance and quality of experience. Further research could expand upon this knowledge with more robust data modeling and analysis, as well as a wider range of actions. This paper describes publicly available datasets from four user studies on the effects of delay on the fundamental game action of selecting a moving target with a pointing device. They include performance data, such as time to selection, and demographic data, such as age and gaming experience. Example analysis illustrating the use of the datasets is shown, including comparison of pointing devices, demographic analysis with performance, and analytic modeling.

Delays are ever-present in interactive tasks, such as controlling a cursor with a mouse. Unfortunately, perceptible delays are likely to affect both quality of experience and task performance, and even imperceptible delays can potentially be harmful to performance. This paper presents a controlled behavioural experiment that explores the impact of delay on interactions with motor inputs and visual outputs. Because system and network delays interact and overlap, we address total interface delay, focusing on the effect rather than the cause. In the experiment, 51 participants played a simple game of chase-and -catch, using the mouse to intercept a bouncing target. The game includes three levels of difficulty, defined by the speed of the target, with controlled interface delay added between the mouse and the corresponding cursor. The delay values ranged from the system's minimum processing time of 40 ms up to a total of 440 ms. We evaluated participants' game performance, as well as perceived game responsiveness. In line with predictions, our analyses show a negative relation between delay and quality of experience, along with deteriorating performance. In contrast, performance does not co-vary with self-reported game skill. Moreover, an individual's experience with other time-dependent activities has no significant effect on neither performance nor experience, with one exception - musical practice appears to benefit performance for this type of interaction.

The speedy interactions of many computer games demand prompt reactions from player and system alike. This demonstration invites participants to experience in-game latency. We present variations of two familiar games that use either mouse or key inputs to control actions seen on the monitor. While playing the games, participants can make changes to the temporal offset between a motor input and a resulting visual action, providing them with a direct experience of motor-visual delays. In turn, they will gain an understanding of how performance may suffer when trying to compensate for such delays.

All computer games present some delay between human input and results being displayed on the screen, even when no networking is involved. A well-balanced discussion of delay-tolerance levels in computer games requires an understanding of how much delay is added locally, as well as in the network. This demonstration uses a typical gaming setup wired to an oscilloscope to show how long the total, local delay is. Participants may also bring their own computers and games so they can measure delays in the games or other software.