Gender Differences in Perceptions of Conventional Video, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality

Abstract

The user’s emotional involvement plays an important role in adopting new technologies. The level of engagement with and adoption of new digital applications depends on various personal, contextual, and emotional factors. In our study, we assessed the personal factors, such as gender differences, of perceiving and adopting technologies such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and conventional video. Furthermore, we assessed what kind of emotions are involved in and invoked by the context of new technologies. This is a quantitative study in which students were asked to perform experiments on VR, AR, and conventional videos. After the experiments, participants were asked to fill out a predefined survey about their emotional reactions to the experiments. The results show, unlike the prior research, that female participants were more enthusiastic about the usage of new technologies than males. The user experience of VR, AR and conventional videos triggered more positive emotions among females than males. For practitioners, the results suggest that the audio-visual technologies could engage more females than males. For academics, this study provides further research on how to trigger users to adopt new audio-visual technologies.