Presence when interacting with Graphical User Interfaces in Virtual Reality - A Qualitative Study of Tutorials in Virtual Reality Games

Abstract

When developing games for virtual reality (VR), presence – a sense of “being there” in the virtual environment – is an important aspect to take into account, especially when designing tutorials to those games. The reason for this is the often negative impact graphical user interfaces can have on a user’s sense of presence. This master’s thesis has therefore investigated what factors that needs to be considered, and how these factors should be used, in order to not break presence when designing tutorials for VR games. We have achieved this by designing and developing a VR game that contains three different tutorial interfaces, designed to induce different amounts of presence in a user. These three tutorial prototypes has been tested by VR users, and then compared and evaluated through qualitative interviews and the Igroup Presence Questionnaire. Finally, the resulting data was coded, analyzed and summarized into 20 general guidelines for designing tutorials for presence in VR. The result partially followed notions from previous studies, but also revealed some interesting angles on the subject. This study is entirely qualitative and has not been controlled for statistical significance, neither have the guidelines been practically tested yet, so one should be aware of the possibility of different outcomes due to differences in circumstances when applying them. Although not an entirely complete and absolute solution to the problem, we hope that these guidelines can help developers in this area, and perhaps act as stepping stones for future studies on the subject. The prototypes can be downloaded and played at itch.io[1] and the project files are also available on Github[2].