Visual Environment Design of VR Space for Sequential Reading in Web Browsing

Abstract

Recently, the use of VR is diversifying with the spread of the relatively cheap VR equipment. VR has been used in games, entertainment facilities, educational fields and so on. For example, web browsing in VR space is one of the focused fields. Some of its typical applications are Bigscreen and Virtual Desktop. Since these applications can create a big size screen for the web browser, users could easily browse the web in the VR space. Web browsing can be classified into information search and information acquisition (sequential reading). However, research on the information acquisition has not been conducted yet. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to verify the optimal visual environment for information acquisition task in the VR space. In the experiment, we created six conditions’ web pages using Unity. They were consisted of two font size conditions and three screen size conditions. In the experimental task, the subjects were asked to loudly read the text on the screen, and they were asked to answer a questionnaire for subjective evaluation. In order to compare readability of each conditions, invisible area and reading time were measured. From the experimental results, we could verify the suitable visual environment for web browsing in VR space.