Exploring Attitudes Towards Increasing User Awareness of Reality From Within Virtual Reality

Abstract

The occlusive nature of VR headsets introduces significant barriers to a user’s awareness of their surrounding reality. While recent research has explored systems to facilitate a VR user’s interactions with nearby people, objects, etc, we lack a fundamental understanding of user attitudes towards and expectations of these systems. We present the results of a card sorting study (N=14) which investigated attitudes towards increasing a VR user’s reality awareness (awareness of people, objects, audio, pets, and systems to manage and moderate personal usage) whilst in VR. Our results confirm VR headsets should be equipped with systems to increase a user’s awareness of reality. However, opinions vary on how increased awareness should be achieved as our results also highlight differing expectations regarding: persistent vs temporary notification design, notification content and when, why and how awareness should be increased.