Procrastination in Virtual Reality: An Exploration into Performance and Physical Activity

This study addresses the issue of procrastination in home-based virtual reality (VR) physical exercise. A total of n = 52 participants who owned Oculus Quest 2 headsets were involved in the study. The participants were tasked with completing six fifteen-minute High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) sessions within fourteen days, with three training sessions to be completed within the first seven days. The participants were allowed to schedule the sessions themselves. First we measured the participants’ average physical training performance using our custom VR application. Next we calculated the average interval between individual training sessions and categorized the participants into two groups. Those inclined to cluster their training sessions daily were assigned to the block training group, while those whose sessions were distributed more evenly were assigned to the distributed training group. Our findings suggest that procrastination leads to poorer performance during training sessions in a VR environment. Individuals in the block training group demonstrated significantly lower average training performance than those in the distributed training group.