UX Cork July

The Development and Validation of a Heuristic Checklist for Virtual Reality Games

Daniel Smith graduated in May 2021 with a Ph.D. in human factors psychology where he spent most of his free time working on industry-style video games side projects. He completed an internship at Nike in 2019, Facebook AR/VR in 2020, and is currently employed full-time at Oculus, also known as Facebook Reality Labs.

Virtual reality gaming is a growing market and sector of technology. As with any new tech field, the current research is scarce, scattered, and often not profitable. It’s important that virtual reality (VR) games feature a good user experience (UX) in order to support the adoption of this new technology. Currently, no effective comprehensive evaluative tools exist for VR games, so this research sought to create a comprehensive heuristic checklist for the evaluation of VR games based on baseline requirements for immersion, presence, and flow.