Towards instrumental quality assessment of multisensory immersive experiences using a biosensor-equipped head-mounted display

Multisensory virtual reality (VR) experiences, which include haptic and/or olfactory feedback, are growing in popularity. Notwithstanding, an understanding of their impact on perceived quality of experience (QoE), and on several QoE factors, such as sense of presence, immersion, realism, engagement, emotions, and cybersickness, is still limited. Here, we explore the use of a biosensor-equipped VR head-mounted display (termed sHMD) to measure correlates of these QoE factors directly from the collected neurophysiological signals. An experiment with 11 participants was performed and showed that adding haptic and olfactory feedback significantly improved the users’ motivations, sense of presence, task engagement, and overall QoE relative to a conventional audio-visual immersive experience. Moreover, several metrics derived from the biosignals showed significant correlations with subjective measures of presence, realism, emotions, and overall QoE. These findings suggest that wearables could potentially be used to track QoE-related measures, thus allowing for personalized multisensory experiences to be created “on the fly”.