Impact of Constant Visual Biofeedback on User Experience in Virtual Reality Exergames

With the rise of Virtual Reality (VR) as trend in technology - also available for end users - came many opportunities for serious and gaming applications. One domain of games for virtual environments are exergames - a combination of exercising and gaming. For many exergames, users need to be instructed on how the exercise has to be performed correctly. In this study, a rowing simulation is extended by visualizations in VR that show constant live biofeedback information about the rowers current breathing patterns. In order to compare the effects of such additional information, several visualizations of biofeedback were designed: animation of lungs, line chart, and numerical breathing synchronization feedback. The main goal of the game for participants was to focus on their breathing rhythm and maintain it. Results show that helpfulness and sympathy were rated statistically significantly higher for the case of combined instructional elements compared to no elements. Moreover, participants rated rowing in VR statistically significantly higher on the sympathy scale compared to rowing without VR. Furthermore, flow was rated statistically significantly higher for the conditions including all instruction types. There was a significant decrease of task performance for conditions with performance visualizations. For future studies we are planning to use longer stimulus duration, greater than 10 minutes, due to this change we expect that a potential increase of task performance will manifest.