A Sentiment Analysis Approach to Comprehend Users’ Perception of VR HMDs Gaming Applications

Virtual reality (VR) is an emerging technology whose goal is to combine the real and virtual worlds to facilitate users' learning experience. Prominent organizations have recently shown immense interest in investing in this technology to make it available for a variety of multifaceted uses, including gaming, education, healthcare, entertainment, and therapeutic purposes. In recent times, a significant increase in user engagement has been observed in VR platforms, particularly for VR HMDs gaming applications. As a result, it has been crucial to analyze and determine user satisfaction regarding VR HMDs gaming applications. Therefore, this study aims to investigate and understand user sentiments regarding VR HMDs gaming applications further. To take a step towards this understanding, we incorporated a publicly available 'Game reviews of VR HMDs' dataset collected from Steam, Viveport, and Oculus VR gaming platforms. A total of 176428 reviews were investigated through the lexicon-based sentiment analysis technique, such as Natural Language Processing (NLP). The conducted sentiment analysis suggests that (i) users have an overall positive view of VR HMDs gaming applications, which represents having advanced gamification elements, (ii) users prefer to express their positive opinion through long reviews than negative ones and (iii) more frequently occurring words are identified as non-categorical where word correlations are not prominently different between review types. The presented insights of this study may be helpful for VR HMD gaming application developer to understand the user’s perception for future improvements. Besides, this presented approach might be helpful to determine the sentiment of a particular gaming application or new products and services in different domains.