Positive or Negative? The Effect of Self-motion Speed on Flow Experience is Moderated by Susceptibility to VR Sickness

Chao Zhou, Juan Liu, Wenxiu Geng, Baiqiao Zhang, Kaiyuan Jiang, Yulong Bian

Abstract: Future activities conducted within the Metaverse will require users to actively navigate in complex virtual reality (VR) environments. Users’ sense of self-motion during active navigation may contribute to flow experience, but this also improves the risk of VR sickness. The effect of self-motion on flow experience is still unexplored. To explore this question, this paper developed an experimental VR environment supporting active navigation at different speeds and subsequently performed two experiments. Experiment 1 first examined the effect of self-motion speed on flow experience and VR sickness. Experiment 2 examined the potential moderating effect of VR sickness susceptibility in the relationship between self-motion speed and flow experience. The results showed that the effect of self-motion speed on flow experience was moderated by participants’ VR sickness susceptibility. For participants with low susceptibility, self-motion speed had a significantly positive effect on flow experience; for participants with high susceptibility, the effect was not significant.