Are you a very suggestible person? Highly imaginative? Then VR may work better for you.
A team of computer scientists led by researchers at the University of Bath have discovered that people who are more suggestible feel a greater sense of presence when using virtual reality (VR) than people who are less suggestible.
Developers in the VR world have long assumed that the quality of a user’s VR equipment directly improves the quality of their VR experience. But the new Bath study suggests that the nature of an individual’s imagination may be just as important, if not more important, than the quality of VR equipment.
“We found imagination is an important component in the formation of presence: the better a person’s imagination, the more able they are to find themselves in that world,” said Dr Christopher Clarke, researcher from the Department of Computer Science at Bath and study co-author.
In reporting on their study, the researchers commented that “by examining how psychological factors such as imaginative suggestibility can transform the effects of technology, developers will be in a position to design better virtual worlds for any application.”
The researchers presented their findings at this year’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, the premier international conference of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). The researchers believe that their work lays the foundation for software developers to improve VR applications by tailoring them to the personalities of individual players.