Sailing through Signs: Attention Guidance towards Texts in Virtual Reality

Virtual reality (VR) devices have technically matured during the last few years. Apart from offering better resolutions and a wider field of view, these devices provide novel interaction forms that resemble real-world interactions. Players can explore the virtual environment and manipulate objects to reach game goals. Frequently, players need to be informed about what to do next or how a particular objective could be achieved. This is often done via texts placed in the virtual environment. However, these texts are frequently overlooked or ignored, resulting in player frustration due to a lack of guidance. This paper investigates various design strategies to guide the player's attention to pay attention to the text in a virtual environment. To achieve this, we set up a comparative study to evaluate four different types of attention guidance. Results revealed that players prefer some guidance forms in particular.