Intensifying Stress Perception Using Visual Effects in VR Games

Visual effects are used in commercial video games to enhance the players' perception without being investigated in terms of their actual impact on the players. In our work, we implemented five visual effects, namely vignetting, image noise, chromatic aberration, color grading, and blur and investigated their impact on the players' perceived stress, presence, and simulator sickness. A user study (N = 6), conducted with a virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD), shows that these visual effects can intensify the players' stress perception without negatively effecting perceived presence and without increasing simulator sickness.