User Individual Characteristics and Perceived Usability in Immersive HMD VR: A Mixed Method Explorative Study

Abstract

The association between personality and individual tendency for adopting and optimally interfacing with new technologies has often been proposed in the literature. However, only few published studies report experimental data. This study aims to provide evidence on the association between several individual variables and usability experience in modern immersive visual technologies. Our results are inconclusive regarding a relationship between participants’ personality and experienced sense of presence with perceived usability. The severity of the simulator sickness symptoms during the virtual experience is showed to be negatively associated with reported system usability. However, due to the small sample size and the number of variables examined, our results have only an explorative value. Qualitative analyses show that, despite positive attitude towards the use of VR for training, the ergonomic limitations of the VR headset and the suboptimal realism of the simulated scene were reported by the participants.