Impact of verbal communication on user experience in 3D immersive virtual environments

Understanding the user experience has become over the last decade a major concern for both scientific community and industry. In the field of virtual reality, user experience models have already been established, however, only some of them have been empirically validated. Furthermore, the potential impact of verbal communication on user experience appears to be marginally studied by scholars. This study aims to assess the impact of verbal communication on specific factors of the user experience in the context of Virtual Reality. These factors are spatial presence, social presence and performance gain. Participants (N = 52) immersed by teams of two players in the game Minecraft had to achieve a specified goal in a given period of time. To measure the impact of verbal communication on this task by comparison, half of teams could not communicate verbally, the other half were able to. Our results highlight a significant positive effect of verbal communication on the performance gain as well as on the hedonic evaluation of the user experience. Despite some limitations and questions raised by this empirical study, these results along with previous literature demonstrate the significant impact induced by interpersonal verbal communication on the user experience in the context of a 3D immersive virtual environment.