The Quest of Spatial Presence by Puzzle-Solving Games in VR

The experience of artificial objects in the virtual environment and the illusion of being there is a primary affordance of the virtual reality (VR) environment. The conviction of being located in a mediated environment is referred to as spatial presence. Although some studies investigate the relationship between VR and spatial intelligence, how users build a spatial presence in VR game environments remains ambiguous. Regarding that, this study tries to elaborate on the spatial presence experience construction and its characteristics in virtual reality (VR) puzzle-solving games by revealing the relationships between game mechanics and spatial presence notion. In this study, the presence-spatial performance relations are initially investigated based on previous works and analyzed in terms of spatial definition. Suppose the VR task performance depends on spatial abilities, people with higher spatial ability finish tasks faster, and their spatial presence score will be higher than people with lower spatial ability. A VR game called Golden Gate VR will be used as a case study to test and elaborate on the hypothesis above. This ongoing study has five steps: (1) Development of the game environment, (2) pre-psychometric assessment for visuo-spatial ability (Pre-Test), (3) Experience of the VR Game, (4) Evaluation of the experiences, (5) Re-development of the game environment. Experiences of the players’ will be evaluated in terms of Mental Imagery, Mental Rotation and Spatial Orientation regarding Spatial Presence Experience Scale (SPES). The first four steps will be elaborated on in this paper.