Effect of Interaction Based on Augmented Context in Immersive Virtual Reality Environment

Virtual reality has recently rapidly emerged into the global spotlight. With the current increasing interest in head mounted display (HMD) as the next-generation content platform to replace smartphones, many companies are endeavoring to gain an early foothold in the virtual reality market. In HMD-based virtual reality environments, users are completely isolated from the real world, and are thus unable to perform even simple and familiar interactions with the real world. This paper proposes interaction based on context information augmented with stories, visuals, and sounds, as opposed to an interface that replicates the existing real world, in order to enable easy and natural interactions by users in HMD-based immersive virtual reality environments. The results of a user study conducted using our proposed augmented context-based interactions in an immersive virtual reality environment verify that it provides users with higher levels of immersion, accuracy, and emotional empathy than a virtual reality environment that simply replicates the existing real world.