Attention Sharing in a Virtual Environment Attracts Others

Virtual reality offers a highly interactive and flexible experience. It has the advantage of enhancing users’ understanding and interest as well as the disadvantage of overlooking the main features in a virtual environment. The excessive amount of information and interactive options in most virtual reality settings may cause users to quit exploring before experiencing the entire content of the virtual environment. In this paper, we propose a new method of inherently encouraging users to continue their experience in virtual environments while permitting free exploration through social interactions. The proposed method generates a joint attention by displaying the movement of the position and gaze direction of other concurrent/previous users. We introduced the proposed method into a virtual museum exploring system and demonstrated it in a real museum to evaluate the effectiveness of our method when used by a large number of people. The results showed that the proposed method enhances users’ interest and prolongs the experience time of virtual museum exploring.