A Virtual Gardening Experience: Evaluating the effect of haptic feedback on spatial presence, perceptual realism, mental immersion, and user experience.

Virtual nature settings have demonstrated to provide benefits to mental well-being. However, most studies have focused on providing only audiovisual stimuli. We aim to evaluate the use of haptic feedback to simulate touching elements in nature-inspired settings. In this paper, we designed a VR gardening environment to investigate the impact of haptic feedback on spatial presence, perceptual realism, mental immersion, user experience, and task performance while interacting with gardening objects in a study (N=18, 9 female and 9 male). Our results suggest that haptic feedback can increase spatial presence and point to gender differences, i.e., female participants reported higher scores in spatial presence and perceptual realism, in the chosen VR experience. Although our main goal was to evaluate the role of haptics in a virtual garden, our findings highlight the importance of investigating and identifying factors that could lead to gender differences in VR experiences.