RetroSketch
A Retrospective Method for Measuring Emotions and Presence in Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality (VR) designers and researchers often need to measure emotions and presence as they evolve over time. The experience sampling method (ESM) is a common way to achieve this, however, ESM disrupts the experience and lacks granularity. We propose RetroSketch, a new method for measuring subjective emotions and presence in VR, where users watch back their VR experience and retrospectively sketch a plot of their feelings. RetroSketch leaves the VR experience undisturbed and yields highly granular data, including information about salient events and qualitative descriptions of their feelings. We compared RetroSketch and ESM in a large study (n=140) using five different VR experiences over one-hour sessions. Our results show that RetroSketch and ESM measures are highly correlated with each other, as well as physiological measures indicative of emotion. The correlations are robust across different VR experiences and user demographics. They also highlight the impact of ESM on users' experience.
CHI'25 Full Paper (🏅 Best Paper Honorable Mention)
- Citation: Dominic Potts, Miloni Gada, Aastha Gupta, Kavya Goel, Klaus Phillip Krzok, Genieve Pate, Joseph Hartley, Mark Weston-Arnold, Jakob Aylott, Christopher Clarke, Crescent Jicol, and Christof Lutteroth. 2025. RetroSketch: A Retrospective Method for Measuring Emotions and Presence in Virtual Reality. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’25), April 26-May 1, 2025, Yokohama, Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 25 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713957 View Paper RetroSketch Tool
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Paper Artifacts Dataset (n=140)