Bridging the Virtual and Real Worlds: A Preliminary Study of Messaging Notifications in Virtual Reality

The Effects of Diminished Reality on the Detection of and Response to Notifications

“…This research contributes to an area of literature that is currently under-studied, concerning diminished reality control and display, as well as to the impact of notifications on the cognitive functions of DR users. This research also builds upon research conducted by Hsieh et al (2020) regarding design recommendations for VR technology as it elaborates on what it means for a notification to be content aware. They previously referred to this as solely relating to time sensitivity and location of a notification; however, the actual message being relayed should be considered here as well.…”

“…Longer messages with specific details appear to be more difficult to recall, less likely to attract and maintain user attention, as well as have low potential to illicit a response from the user. Based on the results from this study, most of the design recommendations given by Hsieh et al (2020) were maintained. Attention awareness, however, does not work for DR as in some cases it is imperative that messages be pushed to users no matter how engaged they are in a task.…”

“…There has been no work on design of messages or notifications to users who have their environment de-emphasized, either visually or auditorily, to draw their attention to a different task or alert them to occurrences within their environment. However, design recommendations for virtual reality (VR) notifications do exist and can be used as a basis to provide ideas for a similar system in DR. Hsieh, Chiang, Chiu, and Chang (2020) tested notification delivery in VR and developed notification design recommendations. These recommendations centered around the premise that notifications should be attention, content, and modality aware.…”

“…Content aware addresses the time sensitivity and location of messages; a message should appear spontaneously at a fixed interval in a user's peripheral vision, and they should be able to choose this fixed interval from a set of peripheral options. Last, modality aware refers to ensuring that the presentation modality for notifications is different from that of the general VR system (Hsieh et al, 2020).…”

Exploring Metaphorical Transformations of a Safety Boundary Wall in Virtual Reality

“…To address this issue, McGill et al [7] designed a system that integrates real-world objects and people into the virtual environment, allowing VR users to interact with them. Inspired by McGill et al's work, numerous studies have explored methods of informing VR users about the presence of bystanders through text notifications [8][9][10][11][12], audio notifications [8,9,11], haptic feedback [9], various avatar views [4,[13][14][15][16], various forms of see-through videos [7,8,14,16,17], etc. However, for bystanders or pets that approach from the side or from behind VR users, VR users cannot immediately and accurately observe their position, even when virtual avatars or see-through videos are displayed in VR [13].…”