User engagement in Virtual Reality (VR) games is crucial for creating immersive and captivating gaming experiences that meet the expectations of players. However, understanding and measuring these levels in VR games presents a challenge for game designers, as current methods, such as self-reports, may be limited in capturing the full extent of user engagement. Additionally, approaches based on biological signals to measure engagement in VR games present complications and challenges, including signal complexity, interpretation difficulties, and ethical concerns. This study explores body movements, as a novel approach to measure user engagement in VR gaming. We employ E4, emteqPRO, and off-the-shelf IMUs to measure the body movements from diverse participants engaged in multiple VR games. Further, we examine the simultaneous occurrence of player motivation and physiological responses to explore potential associations with body movements. Our findings suggest that body movements hold promise as a reliable and objective indicator of user engagement, offering game designers valuable insights on generating more engaging and immersive experiences.

This year I was pleased to join my co-author Dr Rukshani Somarathna at VRST 2023 where she presented our paper entitled “Rukshani Somarathna, Don Samitha Elvitigala, Yijun Yan, Aaron J Quigley, and Gelareh Mohammadi. 2023. Exploring User Engagement in Immersive Virtual Reality Games through Multimodal Body Movements. In Proceedings of the 29th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST ’23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 3, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1145/3611659.3615687“