Engaging Participants during Selection Studies in Virtual Reality

Selection studies are prevalent and indispensable for VR research. However, due to the tedious and repetitive nature of many such experiments, participants can become disengaged during the study, which is likely to impact the results and conclusions. In this work, we investigate participant disengagement in VR selection experiments and how this issue affects the outcomes. Moreover, we evaluate the usefulness of four engagement strategies to keep participants engaged during VR selection studies and investigate how they impact user performance when compared to a baseline condition with no engagement strategy. Based on our findings, we distill several design recommendations that can be useful for future VR selection studies or user tests in other domains that employ similar repetitive features.