Long-Term Effects of User Expertise and Application Design on Collision Anxiety in VR Games

Virtual reality (VR) applications achieve their high immersive potential by detaching the user from the real world, replacing it through a virtual environment. This detachment also blocks real-world orientation cues, which might cause fear of colliding with the real environment and negatively impact the player experience. However, since collision anxiety (CA) is a relatively young concept, it is unclear how factors like users' VR expertise or specific game design choices may affect it. We defined expected CA profiles for five commercial VR games and conducted a longitudinal study examining how growing VR expertise and VR game design influence the users' CA. After six weeks and a total of 154 VR sessions, results indicate that CA differs between applications and generally decreases as VR expertise increases. Based on our results, we propose design implications, providing researchers and designers with guidelines on when to expect and how to avoid fear of colliding.