Effectiveness of Adaptive Difficulty Settings on Self-efficacy in VR Exercise

The difficulty is a fundamental factor of the user’s motivation and engagement in some tasks. Dynamic difficulty adjustment (DDA) systems provide users with an optimal level of challenge. Previously, some studies developed a DDA system that can set the task’s difficulty to any level. However, these studies lack the investigation of the influence of the difficulty levels on the psychological aspect. For this purpose, we consider a difficulty setting that consists of stepwise difficulty levels (e.g., hard, normal, and easy) set to adapt to each user’s skill and evaluate it using self-efficacy. In the experiment, we employ a Kendama task in a VR space where the difficulty level can be easily adjusted. The result shows that the difficulty levels in our method can be set according to the user’s skill. Moreover, we experimentally clarify a strong correlation between successful experiences in imagination and the enhancement of self-efficacy in the difficulty setting, which means that adapting difficulty levels to the user’s skill has the potential to enhance self-efficacy effectively.