Master's thesis: Presence in VR tutorials

About the thesis

This thesis was written for Chalmers University of Technology under the Interaction Design and Technologies Master, by me and David Torbjörnsson, my thesis partner.

When developing games for VR, presence – a sense of “being there” in the virtual environment – is an important aspect to take into account, especially when designing tutorials to those games. The reason for this is the often negative impact graphical user interfaces can have on a user’s sense of presence. The Master’s thesis I did therefore investigated what factors that needs to be considered, and how these factors should be used, in order to not break presence when designing tutorials for VR games.

We achieved this by designing and developing a VR game that contains three different tutorial interfaces, designed to induce different amounts of presence in a user. These three tutorial prototypes were tested by VR users, and then compared and evaluated through qualitative interviews and the Igroup Presence Questionnaire.

Finally, the resulting data was coded, analyzed and summarized into 20 general guidelines for designing tutorials for presence in VR. The result partially followed notions from previous studies, but also revealed some interesting angles on the subject.This study was entirely qualitative and has not been controlled for statistical significance, neither have the guidelines been practically tested yet, so one should be aware of the possibility of different outcomes due to differences in circumstances when applying them. Although not an entirely complete and absolute solution to the problem, we hope that these guidelines can help developers in this area, and perhaps act as stepping stones for future studies on the subject.

Check out the video above to get a feel for how the VR puzzles and tutorials worked.

About the development and project

So the actual development in this project was all about creating a virtual environment that we could populate with three different puzzles and three different tutorials.

First of all, we ideated around the concept of presence and interfaces that we were going to research, and came up with the concept of three by three.

We the started to implement the puzzles, to make sure that they worked as intended, and test them for problems.After this part worked as expected, we continued to work on the visual environment and the tutorials, in parallel. It was important that the environment felt inviting, yet didn't steal your attention from the puzzle and tutorial in front of you.

The three tutorials were implemented to enforce presence in different levels. One was a base case, with just a flat screen hanging in the air, with no depth and sounds. The second had the same basic appearance, but with added sounds and depth. And the third was a fully diegetic object in the virtual world, that turned around to show different tutorial slides, and so on.

The different tutorials can be downloaded from itch.io to play, and all of the project files are available at github for those who are curious.

My role

As we were two on the project, all of the ideation, designing and programming were basically collaborative. However, the virtual environment is almost entirely my work, as well as all of the spatial soundscape. I also worked with physics, such as making sure throwing things around worked as expected, and the puzzle mechanics for most of the puzzles.