Hi my name is Katja Rogers
Welcome to this presentation on effects of music on player experience and time perception in virtual reality
The ability to accurately track time has a curious reputation in entertainment media
in that it is both considered a symptom of positively associated constructs such as flow, immersion and engagement
but is also painted as a symptom of potentially obsessive media use
and overall we really don't know very much about time perception in games
that's particularly surprising because games are essentially the catnip of time perception
in that the factors that are known to influence time perception are in many cases inherent components of games or are induced by them
such as attention, cognitive load, emotions, multimodal stimuli, as well as attributes of an observed environment and movement within it
it is important to note that there are different time estimation paradigms
there is prospective time estimation (PTE) which is experienced duration
here, people are instructed beforehand that they will have to provide a time estimation at the end of stimuli exposure
and then there is retrospective time estimation (RTE) where the request for time estimation comes as a surprise after stimuli exposure
we argue that RTE is more ecologically valid for gameplay, as most people don't spend their time in a game thinking about how much time has passed
there is very little research on time perception in games, and what little research exists has shown mixed results
there is even less on audio in games in connection with time perception
similarly there are few works on time perception in VR
in this paper we explored how the presence of music affects time perception in a VR game
we explored this in a bow-and-arrow tower defence VR game
we asked people to play the game in a user study with between-participants design, either with music or without music
our key results in summary are that most participants tended to underestimate the time spent in VR
but also there was significantly more underestimation when music was present
further there was no effect on player experience, including immersion
taking this step by step, this visualization shows the results of time estimation in the study, using a duration scaling method
the majority clearly underestimated the time spent in VR
in terms of the absolute difference from the correct time interval, there was a significant difference depending on whether music was present
the condition with music led to greater misestimation
for all except a single player in the with-music condition, this misestimation was an underestimation
this leads us to suggest the following hypothesis for corroboration in future studies
namely that the addition of music to VR experiences may be able to make players feel like less time has passed
future work will of course have to confirm these results
games are inherently complex stimuli and there are many confounding factors
individual factors as well as different attributes of music and also the strong subjectivity of music perception are all potential confounds
the presence of music did not affect player experience
we measured this as affective state, enjoyment, audiovisual appeal - which does not address audio - mastery, and immersion
this is not entirely unexpected as it does confirm prior work of mine
which has shown a similar lack of effect of music in VR
but it is surprising in the sense that immersion is supposedly tied to time perception bias, to losing track of time
this may hint at a need to rethink our understanding of the connection between time perception and immersion
this study shows that music can affect time perception without affecting immersion, necessarily
a similar mismatch without the music variable was shown by Nordin et al.
they also found an time estimation effect without an effect on immersion
in contrast the reverse was shown by Sanders & Cairns, ten years ago
there music affected immersion, but not time perception
so this points to a need to reconceptualize our understanding of the connection between time perception and immersion
future work will again be needed to confirm these results
as Sanders & Cairns' study was not conducted in VR
as this work and my prior work show, there may be a less pronounced effects of music in VR in general
I would like to note that I am not saying that music is unimportant in VR
we also conducted a preliminary exploratory case study, that needs to be considered with strong limitations
it does provide a tentative counterpoint, that there may be qualitative effects of music on player experience in VR
that are simply not captured by psychometric measures
I would like to leave you with these key takeaways
music may constitute a design tool to make time pass quicker in VR
in the paper we discuss ethical considerations of this use case, as well as the potential of time perception scaffolding
further, music in VR does not seem to strongly affect player experience
really we call upon the community here to join us in researching time perception in games
and the potential reasons for subdued music effects in VR
thank you very much for your attention!
if you would like to discuss this further, or have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me or my co-authors
thank you very much