Analyzing for emotional arousal in HMD-based head movements during a virtual emergency

Abstract. This paper reports on results of a statistical analysis of hu-man players ’ head-movements. Forty-one participants were asked to cope with an unexpected emergency in a virtual parking lot. Before the vir-tual reality exposure began, half of the participants watched an emotion-inducing movie clip and the other half an emotionally neutral one. The analysis of the acquired questionnaire data reveals, however, that this emotion induction method seems to have been rather ineffective. Thus, it is not surprising that only very weak between group effects are found when analyzing for differences in head movements around the emergency event. In general, horizontal head movement speed is found to be on av-erage significantly faster during the first fifteen seconds directly after the emergency event as compared to just before and another fifteen seconds later. These findings are in line with previous results of an analysis of the acquired physiological data, further substantiating the conclusions drawn. 1 Introduction an