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

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.