The arrow hurts, and the dragon fire burns! The recent development of head mounted display (HMD) offered a type of immersive virtual-reality (VR) experience with high-quality spatial graphics and sounds, to simulate what we see and hear in the real world. With these emerging VR technologies, a psychological question could be asked specially: How would different types of sensations affect people’s perception and performance in immersive VR? Taken this question into consideration, we designed The Golden Guardian, an multi-sensory immersive VR game developed using Unity and Arduino, attempting to experiment multi-sensory feedback in VR gaming. In The Golden Guardian, the player wears the HMD (Oculus Rift DK2), the spatial auditory earphone, and the Arduino-controlled tactile headband with an array of vibration motors and peltier heating elements, with a Bluetooth mouse in his/her hand. The player is immersed as an archer to protect his/her castle within 5 minutes, and defeat the randomly appearing attacks, including the enemy archers, small dragons and large dragons. The player needs to move his/her head to aim and click the mouse to launch the arrows. While the game provides in-game visual feedbacks as usual (e.g. directional arrows to indicate the coming enemies), the tactile headband which receives real-time USB signal from the game will provide tactile feedback for different in-game events. The player will feel the vibration when he/she is hit by the arrows from the enemy archers, hear the spatial sound of the dragon roaring, and feel the heat while being hit by the dragon fire. Can these real-world-alike multi-sensory feedbacks assist the player to successfully defeat the enemies? This is the question to explore.

Authors: Taizhou Chen, Junyu Liu, Kening Zhu, and Tamas Waliczky