RetroSketch: A retrospective method for measuring emotions and presence in virtual reality

Potts, Dominic; Gada, Miloni; Gupta, Aastha; Goel, Kavya; Krzok, Klaus Phillip; Pate, Genevieve; Hartley, Joseph; Weston-Arnold, Mark; Aylott, Jakob; Clarke, Christopher; Jicol, Crescent; Lutteroth, Christof

Abstract

Virtual Reality (VR) designers and researchers often need to measure emotions and presence as they evolve over time. The experience sampling method (ESM) is a common way to achieve this, however, ESM disrupts the experience and lacks granularity. We propose \tool{}, a new method for measuring subjective emotions and presence in VR, where users watch back their VR experience and retrospectively sketch a plot of their feelings. RetroSketch leaves the VR experience undisturbed and yields highly granular data, including information about salient events and qualitative descriptions of their feelings. We compared RetroSketch and ESM in a large study (n=140) using five different VR experiences over one-hour sessions. Our results show that RetroSketch and ESM measures are highly correlated with each other, as well as physiological measures indicative of emotion. The correlations are robust across different VR experiences and user demographics. They also highlight the impact of ESM on users' experience.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Mar 4, 2025
• Online Publication Date: Apr 25, 2025
• Publication Date: Apr 25, 2025
• Deposit Date: Apr 7, 2025
• Publicly Available Date: May 21, 2025
• Journal: Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• Print ISSN: 1073-0516
• Electronic ISSN: 1557-7325
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Article Number: 463
• Pages: 1-25
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713957
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/14275087