The rapid development of motion tracking, miniature displays, communication technologies, and the unique characteristics (immersion, realism, engagement) of immersive virtual reality (VR) technologies have changed the nature of gaming and, to a large extent, helped shape its future. The way players interact, and experience VR games is very different from traditional platforms. For instance, VR players are moving from (1) 2D screen-based gaming to 360° gaming, (2) playing the character to being the character, and (3) limited sensory feedback to complete feedback (e.g., touch, taste, smell). Despite these changes, current research on VR games still relies primarily on user evaluation methods and approaches designed for traditional 2D screen-based games. As VR becomes more pervasive, more attention needs to be paid to designing, reconfiguring, or validating methods and approaches for evaluating gameplay and experiences in VR games.
VR provides a golden opportunity for using real-time measures of human responses essential to the players' experience. Traditional physiological or biometrics such as eye-tracking and heart rate, electroencephalography and electromyography, emotions/expressions could be considered and adapted for assessing VR gameplay experience, but they need to be validated. In addition, these physiological data have the potential to be used in real-time to improve the user and gameplay experience. Real-time use of such data remains largely underexplored. This special issue focuses on exploring novel and state-of-the-art user evaluation methods for VR games. We are looking for model papers with high standard, rigorously tested user evaluation methods that other researchers can follow and build on. The special issue aims to bring together researchers from various backgrounds to report their novel methods, approaches, and designs to assess VR gameplay and experience.
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