Comparing Performance and Experience in VR vs. Real-World Through a Puzzle Game

The study aims to explore the VR gaming experience in comparison to real-world gameplay. User performance and experience is compared in an HMD VR puzzle game and its real-world toy replica, with 28 participants in a within-subjects experimental design. Mean comparisons on task time and success rate do not have a significant difference, as well as the subjective task load and task performance obtained through NASA-TLX. The subjective game user experience measures also did not reveal any significant difference between the toy and VR gameplay, except the Enjoyment measures via Game User Experience Satisfaction Scale. Findings suggest that the VR gaming experiences can replace with the real-world gameplay, within the context of a cognitive tasks in a limited representation of spatial surrounding. The interactions with the nearby objects in an HMD-based virtual environment and real-world lead to very similar measurements of user performance and experience.