Investigating physiological and affective responses in virtual reality scenes and enhancing user experience with a gaze-directed method

Virtual Reality (VR) is becoming more common and growing its application areas in many fields. Aside from professional usage, recent releases of commercially available head-mounted displays (HMDs) increased the popularity of VR among consumers. However, VR can cause unwanted effects and fixed stereoscopic camera parameters cause discomfort and shallow depth feeling. Thus, achieving comfortable and high quality stereoscopic 3D view became more crucial. In this thesis, we aim to investigate the effects of VR in detail and develop a method to improve the quality of VR experience. In the first part of the thesis, we investigate the physiological and emotional changes caused by VR. We also take account the cybersickness and analyze these measures jointly. For the second part of the thesis, we propose a method which modifies stereoscopic camera parameters of HMD based on gaze-tracking in real time. We conduct a user study that demonstrates improvements of our method in terms of visual quality, visual comfort, perceived depth and overall experience of the VE. The results show that our method significantly enhances VR experience compared to fixed default parameters.