Virtual look around: comparing presence, cybersickness and usability for virtual tours across different devices

Jean Felipe Patikowski Cheiran; Adriel Rodrigues; Marcelo Soares Pimenta

doi:10.5753/jis.2021.2063

Authors

Jean Felipe Patikowski Cheiran Federal University of Pampa and Institute of Informatics, UFRGS https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9466-6908
Adriel Rodrigues Federal University of Pampa https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8937-4038
Marcelo Soares Pimenta Institute of Informatics, UFRGS https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4712-089X

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5753/jis.2021.2063

Keywords:

UX, User Experience, Suitability Evaluation Questionnaire, Virtual Tour, WebXR

Abstract

Virtual Reality has become readily available in the last few years through different devices, from desktop computers to head-mounted displays (HMD). Also, virtual tours became popular with 360º panoramic photographs and video clips on online social media, so people could visit remote locations without being exposed to crowded transportation or long travels. Also, virtual tours demonstrate considerable potential as a form of escapism and even for remote teaching. Since we lack studies that evaluate the User Experience (UX) in virtual tours on different devices, this article aims to compare aspects of the User Experience (regarding sense of presence, cybersickness, and usability) in a virtual tour website developed in WebXR across different devices. To achieve our objective, we developed a virtual tour based on 360º pictures using WebXR API and React 360 framework and conducted an experiment with 41 undergraduate students using four different devices: a laptop computer, a smartphone, a Google Cardboard headset, and a Samsung Gear VR HMD. We evaluated users’ perceptions by adapting and translating the Suitability Evaluation Questionnaire (SEQ) and users’ performance by measuring the time to fulfill a set of tasks. The main findings from this study include that (i) the overall self-reported experience using Google Cardboard is worse than using other devices, (ii) the users’ performance is quite similar between the platforms, (iii) there is evidence of unexpected cybersickness symptoms in tests with the smartphone, and (iv) the development of a plausible hypothesis concerning low usability having an effect upon the sense of presence. Additional contributions of our research are the adaptation, translation into Portuguese, psychometric analysis, and revised scoring procedures of the SEQ.

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