How Are Your Participants Feeling Today? Accounting For and Assessing Emotions in Virtual Reality

Emotions affect our perception, attention, and behavior. Hereby, the emotional state is greatly affected by the surrounding environment that can seamlessly be designed in Virtual Reality (VR). However, research typically does not account for the influence of the environment on participants’ emotions, even if this influence might alter acquired data. To mitigate the impact, we formulated a design space that explains how the creation of virtual environments influences emotions. Furthermore, we present EmotionEditor, a toolbox that assists researchers in rapidly developing virtual environments that influence and asses the users’ emotional state. We evaluated the capability of EmotionEditor to elicit emotions in a lab study (n=30). Based on interviews with VR experts (n=13), we investigate how they consider the effect of emotions in their research, how the EmotionEditor can prospectively support them, and analyze prevalent challenges in the design as well as development of VR user studies.