Many studies have shown that physical activity, especially walking, tends to stimulate certain cognitive functions, including divergent creativity. The objective of this study was to understand whether some of this gain comes from the perception of movement, and not merely physical activity itself. 32 participants carried out divergent and convergent creativity tasks in a virtual reality environment consisting of a train inside a tunnel, while wearing a Head-Mounted-Display (HMD). For half of the participants, the virtual train was running, and they could therefore see tunnel lamps passing by through the windows. For the other half, the train was stationary. The results of this study indicate that participants perform better at tasks that require divergent creativity when the virtual environment is moving than when it is at a standstill. These results lead to recommendations for the design of tools and environments for meetings and creativity workshops.
The field of Virtual Reality has been developing at a steady pace, and VR is finding new uses as a support for creative tasks. The objective of this study is to propose a theoretical model describing the links between user experience and creativity. Pre-existing theoretical links have been identified in relevant scientific literature. Two experiments were then conducted in order to identify new links and replicate results. These experiments involved respectively 76 and 42 participants who individually performed a task requiring divergent creativity using virtual reality drawing tools. The results indicate that cybersickness leads to a decrease in fluency, i.e. the number of ideas generated, but also shades the links between flow and the relevance of the ideas generated. On the basis of this result, we propose the CRUX model to lead to recommendations for the design of tools and simulations to support divergent creativity.
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