Hello, my name is Crescent Jicol and I am a PhD student at the University of Bath. In
this video I will be presenting our paper titled: Effects of emotion and agency on presence
in virtual reality.
Arguably one of the most important characteristics of virtual reality is its ability to induce
higher levels of presence compared to other conventional forms of media, such as 2D screens.
Significant advancements have been made in what concerns the technical aspects of VR
over the last three decades and yet, research has remained inconclusive on how presence
is affected by human-related factors such as emotion and agency. Even more so, it is
unknown whether emotion and agency interact in the presence-creation process.
Additionally, we were interested in whether the valence of emotions elicited by the virtual
environment will result in different presence levels.
Here we adopt a novel design to investigate the effects of both emotions and agency on
presence by testing virtual environments inducing either happiness or fear, with or without
user agency.
We thus employed a happy virtual environment which took place in a park. In the non-agency
condition users could only observe a friendly dog as seen in the video.
In the happy condition with agency, users could interact with the dog via a laser pointer.
The dog reacted to the laser pointer so as to create the feeling of agency.
The fear scenario occurred in the exact same park environment at night and instead of the
friendly dog there was a creature which would attack the participant. In the non-agency
condition the user could not defend themselves while in the agency one they could use a flashlight
to fend off the creature, thus creating the feeling of agency.
We thus had two design factors, which we named Emotion VE and Agency VE respectively, and
several subjective factors, which were intensity, which was the intensity of the dominant emotion
in each environment, subjective agency, which was the degree to which participants felt
they controlled the virtual environment, and the third one was presence.
Our hypotheses for the study were as follows:
H1 - The intensity of the dominant emotion in each VE (Intensity) will correlate positively
with Presence.
H2 - Presence will be significantly higher in environments where participants have Agency.
H3 - Agency will moderate the effect of Emotion on Presence.
We employed a between participants design and in total we recruited 121 participants.
Results showed that the dominant emotion induced by a virtual environment is positively correlated
with presence. Thus, in the happiness conditions it was the level of felt happiness which predicted
presence, and the felt level of fear predicted presence in the two fear conditions. We can
thus accept the first hypothesis.
For the second hypothesis, we found that presence was higher in the condition which facilitated
agency only in the fear scenario. The same was not found for the happiness conditions.
Therefore, we could only partially accept the second hypothesis.
The explanation for this effect could be the special status of fear amongst all other emotions
as it benefits from cognitive and perceptual priority which stems from its evolutionary
role in survival functions. If the creature we used in the fear condition did in fact
trigger a fight or flight response, this could have made agency all the more important for
defense, and thus made it more salient to participants.
It can be thus said that agency does in fact moderate the effect of emotion on presence,
which validates our third hypothesis.
Last but not least, our data allowed us to build a structural equation model, or SEM
which shows how our two design variables, namely Emotion VE and Agency VE, seen at the
left of the graph, impact emotion intensity and reported subjective agency directly. As
expected Emotion VE and Agency VE also interact and this results in further impact on felt
emotions and agency.
Finally, the observed dissociation between emotion and presence is also reflected in
the SEM, in that the regression coefficient for the effect of Agency on Presence (0.69)
is much higher compared to that of Intensity (0.20). This suggests that emotional intensity
is able to predict presence in VR to a lesser extent than agency is.
Furthermore, our model gives VR designers a tool to predict the effects of their design
choices and thereby optimise designing for presence. Ultimately, it becomes apparent
from the SEM that controlling only emotions or only agency in VR cannot suffice for ensuring
presence. Instead, the interrelations between emotion and agency and their influence on
presence mean that VR designers need to prioritise agency in the right circumstances while designing
the VE to elicit high levels of emotions
Thank you very much for listening from me and my co-authors!