Season Traveller: Multisensory Narration for Enhancing the Virtual Reality Experience
Published: 08/2018
Pravar Jain
Nguyen Thi Ngoc Tram
Koon Chuan
Raymond Koh
David Tolley
Shienny Karwita
Lin Lien-Ya
Yan Liangkun
Kala Shamaiah
Abstract:
Abstract:
In the same way that we experience the real-world through a range of senses, experiencing a virtual environment through multiple sensory modalities may augment both our presence within a scenario and our reaction to it. In this paper, we present Season Traveller, a multisensory virtual reality (VR) narration of a journey through four seasons within a mystical realm. By adding olfactory and haptic (thermal and wind) stimuli, we extend traditional audio-visual VR technologies to achieve enhanced sensory engagement within interactive experiences. Using both subjective measures of presence and elicited physiological responses, we evaluated the impact of different modalities on the virtual experience. Our results indicate that 1) the addition of any singular modality improves sense of presence with respect to traditional audio-visual experiences and 2) providing a combination of these modalities produces a further significant enhancement over the aforementioned improvements. Furthermore, insights into participants’ psychophysiology were extrapolated from electrodermal activity (EDA) and heart rate (HR) measurements during each of the VR experiences.
Citation: Nimesha Ranasinghe, Pravar Jain, Nguyen Thi Ngoc Tram, Koon Chuan Raymond Koh, David Tolley, Shienny Karwita, Lin Lien-Ya, Yan Liangkun, Kala Shamaiah, Chow Eason Wai Tung, Ching Chiuan Yen, and Ellen Yi-Luen Do. 2018. Season Traveller: Multisensory Narration for Enhancing the Virtual Reality Experience. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Paper 577, 13 pages. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174151