How Head-mounted Displays Affect Immersion in Virtual Reality Experiences: A Laboratory Experiment

Immersion is a central concept for understanding the effects of virtual reality (VR), which explains why VR devices such as head-mounted displays (HMDs) are designed to enhance users’ sense of immersion. However, research on how immersion emerges and how HMDs contribute to immersion remains fragmented. Although existing studies offer valuable insights into these effects in isolation, they do not consider the simultaneous positive and negative effects of HMDs on immersion. Yet, these effects collectively play a critical role in consumers’ decisions to adopt or reject HMDs. To address this research gap, we synthesize prior research and present new empirical findings that demonstrate how HMDs can both foster and inhibit immersion in VR. Based on a between-subjects experiment with 126 participants, we provide empirical evidence that immersion is not necessarily higher with HMDs than with traditional displays, such as desktop monitors. While HMDs enhance telepresence and interactivity, which are promoters of immersion, they also increase cybersickness and discomfort, which inhibit immersion. These opposing effects tend to counterbalance one another. Our results contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of immersion in the context of HMD use and offer a novel perspective to explain the slow diffusion of HMDs in consumer markets, despite repeated forecasts of rapid adoption.