Age and gender effects on presence, user experience and usability in virtual environments–first insights

Mario Lorenz, Jennifer Brade, Philipp Klimant, Christoph-E Heyde and Niels Hammer

PLOS ONE, 2023, vol. 18, issue 3, 1-16

Abstract: Virtual Reality (VR) is applied in various areas were a high User Experience is essential. The sense of Presence while being in VR and its relation to User Experience therefore form crucial aspects, which are yet to be understood. This study aims at quantifying age and gender effects on this connection, involving 57 participants in VR, and performing a geocaching game using a mobile phone as experimental task to answer questionnaires measuring Presence (ITC-SOPI), User Experience (UEQ) and Usability (SUS). A higher Presence was found for the older participants, but there was no gender difference nor any interaction effects of age and gender. These findings are contractionary to preexisting limited work which has shown higher Presence for males and decreases of Presence with age. Four aspects discriminating this study from literature are discussed as explanations and as a starting point for future investigations into the topic. The results further showed higher ratings in favor of User Experience and lower ratings towards Usability for the older participants.

Date: 2023
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0283565 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 83565&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0283565

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0283565

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().