Exploring Pupil Dilation in Emotional Virtual Reality Environments

H. Chen , A. Dey , M. Billinghurst , R. W. Lindeman

ICAT-EGVE

The pupil widens with emotional arousal, offering a possible objective read on how VR content affects users. This study designed five VR scenes, each with segments for happiness, fear, anxiety, sadness, and disgust, and captured pupil dilation while controlling for headset brightness. Both negative and positive segments produced pupil dilation, and when heartbeat cues were added across haptic, audio, and visual channels, the combined haptic-visual cue caused the largest change from baseline.

@inproceedings{chen2017,
  author    = {H. Chen and A. Dey and M. Billinghurst and R. W. Lindeman},
  title     = {Exploring Pupil Dilation in Emotional Virtual Reality Environments},
  booktitle = {ICAT-EGVE},
  pages     = {169-176},
  doi       = {10.2312/egve.20171355},
  year      = {2017}
}