An Evaluation of Game Usability in Shared Mixed and Virtual Environments

Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) technologies are increasingly becoming more pervasive and important in the information technology area. Thanks to technological improvements, desktop interfaces are being replaced by immersive VR devices that offer a more compelling game experience. AR games have started to draw attention of researchers and companies for their ability to exploit both the real and virtual environments. New fascinating challenges are generated by the possibility of designing hybrid games that allow several users to access shared environments exploiting the features of both AR and VR devices. However, the user experience and usability can be affected by several parameters, such as the Field-of-View (FoV) of the employed devices or the realism of the scene. The work presented in this chapter aims to assess the impact of the FoV on the usability of the interfaces in a first person shooter game. Two players, interacting with AR (1st player) and VR (2nd player) devices, can fight each other in a large game environment. Although it is not possible to ascertain that different FoVs have affected the game usability, users considered less usable the narrow FoV interfaces, even though they could freely move around the real environment.