Study of virtual reality performance based on sense of agency

Abstract

In recent years, virtual reality (VR) technology has been applied to various needs and problems. However, there are as yet few guidelines for providing VR from user’s characteristics. Therefore, we aimed to make design guideline for VR from an ergonomics viewpoint and by observing the characteristics of the user’s performance in a virtual environment during a task. Thus, the task was designed to be performed in both in reality and a virtual environment. Using the task, we observed undesirable performances by the user which could be affected by aspects of the virtual environment. First, 15 participants completed the task in reality and their performance was measured based on the movement of their hand and a surface electromyogram on their fifth finger and lower arm. We therefore obtained the characteristics of the task. Second, seven participants performed the task in a virtual environment and their performance was observed. When analyzing the results, we found undesirable performance by the participants. We therefore consider the unusual phenomena related to aspects of our VR to be based on the concept of a sense of agency (SoA). Consequently, we estimated that knowledge or predefined significance is limited in a virtual environment and it is not useful to perform tasks in VR and keep SoA to some extent. In this context, we confirmed that introducing the concept of SoA is useful when explaining performance in VR. However, our conceptual consideration should be confirmed in further research.