Positive or Negative? Exploring the Effect of Self-Motion Speed on Flow Experience Based on an Educational Game

Activities conducted in games utilizing immersive virtual reality (VR) environment commonly require users to actively navigate from a first-person perspective. The sense of self-motion from active navigation may contribute to flow experience, but it also increases the risk of VR sickness. Clarifying their underlying relationships can help optimize the design of VR games. To explore this issue, this paper developed an experimental VR environment supporting active navigation at different speeds and subsequently performed two experiments. Experiment 1 first examined the effect of self-motion speed on flow experience and VR sickness. Experiment 2 examined the potential moderating effect of VR sickness susceptibility in the relationship between self-motion speed and flow experience. The results showed that the effect of self-motion speed on flow experience was moderated by VR sickness susceptibility. For participants with low susceptibility, self-motion speed had a significantly positive effect on flow experience, and for participants with high susceptibility, the effect was not significant.