A Comparison between Oculus Rift and a Low-Cost Smartphone VR Headset: Immersive User Experience and Learning

Differences in technological characteristics between expensive head-mounted displays like Oculus Rift and low-cost mobile-based Virtual Reality (VR) devices may affect the experience of the user and learning in virtual environments with an educational content and therefore are important to be studied. This paper describes a study that aims at finding differences in levels of spatial presence, usability, simulator sickness, satisfaction, workload and learning outcome between Oculus Rift and a low cost smartphone VR Headset, when users interact with an educational virtual environment. Our results do not show differences in the variables studied. It seems that mobile-based VR systems could provide acceptable levels of immersive user experience and contribute to the pedagogical use of VR.