Comparing user QoE via physiological and interaction measurements of immersive AR and VR speech and language therapy applications

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) applications are gaining significant attention in industry and academia as potential avenues to support truly immersive and interactive multimedia experiences. Understanding the user perceived quality of immersive multimedia experiences is critical to the success of these technologies. However, this is a multidimensional and multifactorial problem. The user quality of experience (QoE) is influenced by human, context and system factors. Attempts to understand QoE via multimedia quality assessment has typically involved users reporting their experiences via post-test questionnaires. More recently, efforts have been made to automatically collect objective metrics that can quantitatively reflect user QoE in terms of physiological measurement methods. In this context, this paper presents a novel comparison of objective quality measures of immersive AR and VR applications through physiological: (electrodermal activity (EDA) and heart rate (HR)); and interaction (response times (RT), incorrect responses, and miss-click) metrics. The analysis shows consistency in terms of physiological ratings and miss-click metrics between the AR and VR groups. Interestingly, the AR group reported lower response times and less incorrect responses compared to the VR group. The difference between the AR and VR groups was statistically significant for the incorrect response metric and in 45.5% of the cases tested for response times metric, they were statistically significant with 95% confidence levels.