Which User Guidance Works Better in VR? A User Guidance Learning Effect Study in Virtual Environment

Virtual reality (VR) has become popular recently due to the release of several consumer-grade VR devices. At present, VR technology has been widely used in education, entertainment, and other fields. However, up to now, there is no unified method to teach users how to interact in the virtual environment. This work explores the impact of guidance forms on user experience and basic operations in virtual environments based on three VR games with interactive content ranging from simple to complex. We conducted a user study (n=105) to compare the impact of text-and-image-based guidance, video-based guidance, and interactive guidance on user experience and basic operational learning. The results show that interactive guidance makes users more immersive, especially in environments that involve complex interactions. At the same time, the user’s sense of immersion, which is reflected in the heart rate change in this study, is also significantly correlated with the user’s learning situation and can be used as an indicator to roughly estimate the user’s learning situation. These findings emphasize that user-guidance forms, as an important part of the virtual reality experience, can directly affect the user experience and the user’s learning of operations in the virtual environment.