With the rise of consumer-grade virtual reality (VR) devices, users can now enjoy a fully immersive VR experience from the comfort of their home. On the other hand, the home environment with complicated spatial setup and dynamics, especially in limited physical space, may hinder the VR user experience. While existing research tried to integrate non-user human activities in VR, pets' movement may be more unpredictable. In this paper, we investigate the integration of real-world pet activities into immersive VR interaction. Our pilot study showed that the active pet movements, especially dogs, could negatively impact users' performance and experience in immersive VR. We proposed three different types of pet integration, namely semitransparent real-world portal, non-interactive object in VR, and interactive object in VR. We conducted the user study with 16 pet owners and their pets. The results showed that compared to the baseline condition without any pet-integration technique, the approach of integrating the pet as interactive objects in VR yielded significantly higher participant ratings in perceived realism, joy, multisensory engagement, and connection with their pets in VR.

Authors: Ningchang Xiong, Qingqin Liu, and Kening Zhu (*).