User’s experience in virtual reality includes different cognitive, emotional, and behavioural factors. One key factor that characterises the interaction between humans and their environment is the sense of Agency. In virtual reality, the sense of Agency is defined as the sensation of having a virtual body which moves and acts accordingly to one’s intentions. However, it is usually measured with self-assessed questionnaires, focusing mainly on motor control within the virtual environment. We designed an experiment based on a game of rigged archery, manipulating avatar control and distant consequences of user’s actions. This allowed us to separately study both dimensions of Agency: the Feeling of Agency and the Judgement of Agency. Through this, we studied how they are linked with other psychological factors such as Locus of Control, Satisfaction and Self-Serving Attributional Bias. Our results suggest an influence of Internal Locus of Control on the Feeling of Agency. We observed that participant’s satisfaction levels was correlated with their assessment of Agency, and more prominently their Judgement of Agency. In addition, our results show that Feeling of Agency and Judgement of Agency can be understood as two distinct parameters of one’s subjective experience in virtual reality. Lastly, we observed that participants immersed in our virtual environment did show a Self-Serving Attributional Bias, as in real life. Indeed, they tended to claim authorship on successful actions while blaming failure on external factors. We believe that these results offer a better understanding of the different factors that could impact the sense of Agency in virtual reality.

Thanks to its strong capacity to immerse users in virtual worlds, virtual reality can elicit various emotions with diverse environments. This aspect of virtual reality makes it an interesting and powerful tool in many fields, such as entertainment with scenarios based on a strong emotional implication, training in particular for social or communication skills, or even medical therapy with phobia or addiction treatment. However, in virtual reality the participant lives the experience through an avatar, and feels the emotion according to what happens to this avatar.This paper discusses the link between embodiment and emotional implication in virtual reality. In particular, we looked at how emotions and the sense of embodiment are correlated in virtual reality. Through an experiment, we demonstrate that the sense of embodiment is strongly correlated with the emotional experience of the virtual environment. The sense of embodiment is increased when the virtual scenarios make the participants feel strong emotions, whether those emotions are positive or negative. We also show that emotions mainly affect two sub-components of embodiment: the appearance and response sub-scales.

In this paper, we present the design of ten different 3D user interactions using passive haptics and embedded in an escape game scenario in which users have to escape from a pyramid in a limited time. Our solution is innovative by its modularity, allowing interactions with virtual objects using tangible props manipulated either directly using the hands and feet or indirectly through a single prop held in the hand, in order to perform several interactions with the virtual environment (VE). We also propose a navigation technique based on the “impossible spaces” design, allowing users to naturally walk through several overlapping rooms of the VE. All together, our different interaction techniques allow the users to solve several enigmas built into a challenging scenario inside a pyramid.