The evaluation of user experience of a human walking and a driving simulation in the virtual reality

Abstract Virtual reality (VR) has been implemented in various applications such as gaming, e-learning, rehabilitation, etc. Although many studies have been conducted to evaluate the user experiences (UX) of various applications in VR, there are few studies evaluating the UX of VR in a holistic view. Since user experience means holistic feelings caused by attributes like efficiency, effectiveness, pleasure, and attractiveness, it is necessary to evaluate user experience in many respects, including presence, usability, and workload. Therefore, this study aims to evaluate the UX of VR in four various metrics: presence, workload, usability, and flow. In this study, the user experience factor was confirmed through the previous studies comparing visual display terminals (VDT) and head-mounted displays (HMD). In addition, the UX difference between VDT and HMD in two different situations, walking and driving, is analyzed. The data of 26 participants were analyzed and found that there were significant differences in the four studied metrics related to UX. In the driving situation, the usability value was higher in VDT, whereas they were higher in HMD for walking. Comparing the two contexts in HMD, walking was significantly higher in three metrics: presence, usability, and flow. The results show that HMD is better in terms of user experience than VDT, and HMD is more suitable for walking situations than for driving situations. Through this study, in terms of user experience, it is suitable to replace walking tasks with VR when the experiment in a real-world environment is impossible.