Developing a model to evaluate and improve user experience with hand motions in virtual reality environments

In video games, the evaluation of the user experience (UX) mainly refers to two main groups of aspects, those that refer to the player that is mainly oriented to make the player feel good while playing and those that refer to the video game that is oriented to make the video game easy to understand and play. The aspects considered that are related to the player are engagement, enjoyment, and flow; the aspects related to video game, usability, and dependability. Virtual reality environments today have changed the paradigm in various fields of application, such as health, education, entertainment, among others. Therefore, it is important to observe the effects of handedness with hand movements in virtual reality environments. This work proposes a model to evaluate and improve the user experience considering player and video game aspects, taking into account handedness with hand movements in virtual reality environments. Player and video game aspects can be added to evaluations of the effect of handedness, especially in virtual reality environments, in order to know the user’s behavior in terms of skill, performance, and accuracy, among other features by using a particular hand to perform specific tasks. Next, a case study is presented with two groups of users using a virtual reality environment to perform several user tasks considering the dominant and non-dominant hand. By evaluating the user tasks it is possible to know the levels of engagement, enjoyment, motivation, and usability in a virtual reality environment. Finally, an analysis of results is presented in which several improvements of UX are presented.