Exploring Usability, Emotional Responses, Flow Experience, and Technology Acceptance in VR: A Comparative Analysis of Freeform Creativity and Goal-Directed Training

This study compared two virtual reality (VR) interaction modes and assessed differences in characteristics, namely usability, emotional responses, flow experience, technology acceptance, activity effectiveness, preference, and satisfaction, aiming to gain insights for proposing design suggestions. The two types of VR interaction examined were freeform creativity, which enabled users to autonomously explore and create using the Gravity Sketch drawing program, and goal-directed training, which involved structured task completion by using a VR dumbbell exercise program developed with Unity. This study involved 33 participants and revealed three key findings. First, both VR modes exhibited excellent results in terms of flow experience, technology acceptance, preference, and satisfaction and evoked strong positive emotions. They also demonstrated shared VR advantages, including overcoming screen constraints and facilitating three-dimensional spatial activities. Second, compared with goal-directed training, freeform creativity elicited greater levels of pleasure, evoked more intense emotional responses, and demonstrated superior performance across related indicators. Third, in terms of usability, goal-directed training surpassed freeform creativity, particularly in overall responsiveness, simplicity, and clarity of information presentation, and learnability, underscoring the importance of enhancing usability for complex tasks in VR application design. These findings offer valuable insights for crafting more appealing, practical, and user-friendly VR systems in the future.