Emotional Experience in Virtual Reality Sports Use

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) sports have become a new phenomenon and have attracted the attention of both practitioners and academics. Emotion has been suggested to be an important lens to understanding individuals’ information system (IS) use experience. However, few studies have attempted to differentiate the factors triggering users’ various emotions in VR sports use, which could provide a deep understanding of users’ emotional experience in VR sports use. This study investigates the reasons for six discrete emotions (joy, surprise, anger, sadness, fear, and disgust) in VR sports use with user-generated online reviews about 67 VR sports applications. Different factors are found to be associated with the six discrete emotions from the perspectives of content, VR technological features, and social interaction in VR sports use. The current study provides an understanding of the discrete emotions in VR sports and the reasons for these discrete emotions in VR sports use.