Key result
Exploration of a virtual reality museum evoked similar self-reported psychological arousal as a real museum but did not elicit the same cardiovascular autonomic responses, with arousal recognition models achieving 72.92% accuracy in the real environment versus 70.39% in the virtual environment.
Why the study?
There is a need to validate virtual reality and assess the similarities and differences in physiological responses provoked by real versus virtual environments.
Does virtual reality exploration evoke the same cardiovascular autonomic responses (HRV) as a real physical environment during emotional arousal in healthy adults?
RCT (n=60)
Open-label
Randomly assigned
No
Does virtual reality exploration evoke the same cardiovascular autonomic responses (HRV) as a real physical environment during emotional arousal in healthy adults?
Absolute Event Rate: 70.39% vs 72.92%
While virtual reality can evoke self-reported psychological arousal similar to real environments, it does not necessarily elicit the same cardiovascular autonomic (HRV) responses.
VR car scenarios may elicit distinct physiological responses versus real settings; leaves open VR validity for emotion research.
Many affective computing studies have developed automatic emotion recognition models, mostly using emotional images, audio and videos. In recent years, virtual reality (VR) has been also used as a method to elicit emotions in laboratory environments. However, there is still a need to analyse the validity of VR in order to extrapolate the results it produces and to assess the similarities and differences in physiological responses provoked by real and virtual environments. We investigated the cardiovascular oscillations of 60 participants during a free exploration of a real museum and its virtualisation viewed through a head-mounted display. The differences between the heart rate variability features in the high and low arousal stimuli conditions were analysed through statistical hypothesis testing; and automatic arousal recognition models were developed across the real and the virtual conditions using a support vector machine algorithm with recursive feature selection. The subjects' self-assessments suggested that both museums elicited low and high arousal levels. In addition, the real museum showed differences in terms of cardiovascular responses, differences in vagal activity, while arousal recognition reached 72.92% accuracy. However, we did not find the same arousal-based autonomic nervous system change pattern during the virtual museum exploration. The results showed that, while the direct virtualisation of a real environment might be self-reported as evoking psychological arousal, it does not necessarily evoke the same cardiovascular changes as a real arousing elicitation. These contribute to the understanding of the use of VR in emotion recognition research; future research is needed to study arousal and emotion elicitation in immersive VR.
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Marín‐Morales et al. (2021) conducted an RCT in Healthy subjects (n=60). Virtual reality museum exploration vs. Real museum exploration was evaluated on Arousal recognition accuracy using HRV features. Exploration of a virtual reality museum evoked similar self-reported psychological arousal as a real museum but did not elicit the same cardiovascular autonomic responses, with arousal recognition models achieving 72.92% accuracy in the real environment versus 70.39% in the virtual environment.
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