Exploring older people’s user experiences with VR: A case study of Taiwanese seniors

Abstract

Despite much research on virtual reality (VR) techniques, few studies have explored older people’s use. Virtual reality is emerging as a promising tool to stimulate physical activity, overcome barriers to aging, and enrich older people’s leisure and recreational lives. In Taiwan, medical teams have formally introduced VR equipment to help seniors use serious games for rehabilitation. In the wake of such VR leveraging, our study aims to investigate the operation and usability assessment of VR devices of Taiwan’s older people over 70, who felt comfortable in virtual environments throughout the experiment and enjoyed VR task performance and interaction. We used two sets of virtual devices to play game levels and discuss elderly control and usage. The study shows that the two handheld controller designs (symmetric and asymmetric) significantly affected the intuitive mapping of older people’s use, with a more intuitive response to the natural mapping of asymmetric controllers mimicking hand shapes. Three key factors (oculomotor disturbance, disorientation, and nausea) were extracted from previous VR motion sickness studies, using the SSQ scale to measure motion sickness issues. The results indicate that more than half of the subjects were not affected by motion sickness issues, indirectly confirming some previous studies that older people are better off than young people with motion sickness. Therefore, more senior-friendly VR content is expected as most older people, physically aging though, yet with fewer sickness issues incurred, are willing to experience VR.