People with vivid imaginations are more likely than others to believe they truly inhabit the worlds they visit in virtual reality (VR) according to new research led by the University of Bath.

This finding, published at this year’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems – the premier international conference of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) – lays the foundation for software developers to improve VR applications by tailoring them to the personalities of individual players.

Dr Crescent Jicol, CAMERA researcher and lead author of the paper, said: “Different people imagine sensations, colours, images, sounds and smells at very different levels of vividness. So, if I say, ‘Your hand is under a constant stream of water’, you’ll be able to imagine this very differently depending on your imaginative suggestibility. The easier you find it to imagine such a scenario, the more present you’ll be in VR.”

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