Visual quality is a critical determinant of user experience in immersive virtual environments. Although many studies have focused on integrated measures of presence or immersion, few have examined how the distinct aspects of visual quality relate to specific experiential factors. This review decomposes the visual quality features into three domains: modelling, hardware and rendering, and motion and interaction. User experience in a virtual environment can be divided into perception, realism, immersion, and presence. A detailed manual review of 90 focused studies published between 2014 and 2025 is conducted, and their main findings are mapped according to these categories. This review highlights the importance of linking technical features to user-centred outcomes. It offers practical guidance for virtual reality and augmented reality applications in education, architecture, simulation, entertainment, and healthcare. Furthermore, this review identifies research gaps, including inconsistencies in the reported effects of hardware features and the limited integration of multimodal feedback in current studies. Future research should further explore adaptive and multimodal approaches to improve user engagement.
Zhang et al. (Wed,) studied this question.