How We See Changes How We Feel: Investigating the Effect of Visual Point-of-View on Decision-Making in VR Environments

Virtual reality (VR) can immerse users into engaging experiences, affording opportunities to study behaviour in simulated contexts such as decision-making processes. However, methodological research into designing meaningful VR experiences -experiences that promote appreciation and deeper understanding of a workis still underdeveloped. In this two-part study, we investigate how visual point-of-view (POV) in VR impacts feelings of meaningfulness and empathy as well as objective decision-making processes. Our study revolves around a VR application that situates users in moral dilemmas from three different POVs. Data from the choices made is augmented with self-reported subjective data. We find that, from different POVs, users' subjective feelings do show change; users show greater empathy for virtual agents and have an increasingly meaningful experience from a first-person perspective, even if this is not always reflected in changes in their decisions. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings in the context of VR application design.

CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in HCI.