Effect of illumination on reading performance and affect in a virtual environment

Abstract

The development of virtual reality (VR) technology facilitates reading in a virtual environment. However, how the virtual environmental factors influence users’ reading performance has not been studied. Researchers need to compare reading in a virtual environment to the real world situation and to normal digital displays. This paper examined the effect of illumination (dim vs. glaring) in a virtual environment on Chinese text understanding performance, long-term recall performance and affect. The effect of gender is also discussed. The results reveal that in a brightly lit environment, people show better text understanding and logic reasoning performance. However, in a dim environment, people concentrate more and have better long-term memory performance. These findings can be used in guidelines for designers and virtual environment developers. A brightly lit environment is more suitable for understanding and for logical reasoning tasks and a dim environment is suggested for tasks regarding memory and concentration.