How Interactions Shape the User Experience – a Mobile Virtual Reality User Study

Abstract: Virtual reality is becoming more popular and accessible to a broaderaudience, since practically every modern smartphone can be used. The problemwith new components of a technology is the lack of guidelines for the developers.In this thesis, a set of mobile virtual reality games were analysed and broken downinto its core interactions. These interactions were then isolated and implemented ina test application to be the base for a user study. A description of theimplementation was presented focusing on these interactions. The purpose of theuser study was to compare the different interactions and compare them to atraditional controller. From this, guidelines for mobile virtual reality interactionswere developed by analysing the result comparing the interactions for both gamersand non-gamers performance in the user study. The results of this thesis showedthat there are more preferred interactions in virtual reality and that both people thatplay video games, and those who do not, prefer virtual reality interactions over atraditional controller in many cases.