My Heart Will Go On: Implicitly Increasing Social Connectedness by Visualizing Asynchronous Players' Heartbeats in VR Games

Linda Hirsch, Florian Müller, Francesco Chiossi, Theodor Benga, Andreas Martin Butz

PACMHCI 2023

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction

TL;DR

What we did: We designed a virtual escape room game that visualizes asynchronous players' heartbeats using various types of data visualizations.

What we found: We found that visualizing heartbeats significantly increases feelings of social connectedness among players, particularly when using symbolic heart icons compared to electrocardiogram visualizations.

Takeaway: Our work demonstrates that incorporating physiological data visualizations in single-player games can enrich the social experience and support connections between players who are not playing simultaneously.

Abstract

Social games benefit from social connectedness between players because it improves the gaming experience and increases enjoyment. In virtual reality (VR), various approaches, such as avatars, are developed for multi-player games to increase social connectedness. However, these approaches are lacking in single-player games. To increase social connectedness in such games, our work explores the visualization of physiological data from asynchronous players, i.e., electrocardiogram (ECG). We identified two visualization dimensions, the number of players, and the visualization style, after a design workshop with experts (N=4) and explored them in a single-user virtual escape room game. We spatially and temporally integrated the visualizations and compared two times two visualizations against a baseline condition without visualization in a within-subject lab study (N=34). All but one visualization significantly increased participants’ feelings of social connectedness. Heart icons triggered the strongest feeling of connectedness, understanding, and perceived support in playing the game.

Abstract

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