VR Study: Relevant Data

Presence, immersion, and personality predict a change in mood and the social experience of a virtual reality Western art music concert

Previous research has found that digital engagement with Western art music concerts does not elicit a social experience to the extent that live presentations achieve. Virtual reality (VR) is increasingly being used in various sectors to mitigate limitations since it can create a more immersive and active experience for users. While the technology has been used extensively by the games industry, and received significant attention from ludologists, it has not permeated into the music industry in the same way, and certainly not the Western art music market. We sought to explore the predictors of the social experience of virtual reality presentations of a Western art music concert.

We used a pragmatic, mixed methods approach to collect the data. 50 participants were presented a monoscopic 360° VR recording of a string quintet concert. Social Experience of a Concert Scales (SECS) captured the social experience of participants, and the PANAVA to measure change in mood, in addition to the multimodal presence scale (MPS), and Big Five Personality Inventory. Supplementary open questions were included to more generally explore the participants’ experience of engaging with the VR concert. 

The results suggest that openness to new experiences predicts an increase in positive activation and a decrease in negative activation, and extraversion predicts an increase in valence. Social and physical presence predict the extent to which the concert provided a social experience, based on the MPS and SECS. Many of our findings on the effect of personality on the social experience have replicated the results of previous research, what is novel about our findings is that they replicate these relationships in a virtual setting.