EmoFoot: Can Your Foot Tell How You Feel when Playing Virtual Reality Games?

Understanding feelings in Virtual Reality (VR) games is vital for enhancing engagement in human-computer interaction. Traditional methods for assessing emotions and player experience, both subjective and objective, often fall short of capturing players’ comprehensive and nuanced experiences. This preliminary study introduces EmoFoot, a novel approach leveraging foot pressure sensors to decode player feelings during VR gameplay. We show the diverse patterns of VR game experiences using subjective reports focused on immersion, competence, negative and positive affect, flow, tension, challenge, and engagement. By integrating smart insoles, our research investigates the potential of using foot pressure data to identify valence and arousal levels. We use Machine Learning models to discover how players’ feet can reveal their emotions. EmoFoot aims to introduce a seamless and unobtrusive method for monitoring player experience, contributing to immersive technology by enhancing our understanding of the objective indicators of player emotions and improving the overall gaming experience.