- The paper statistically evaluates the impact of physical stance (sitting or standing) and virtual environment design on user experience during extended reality (XR) climbing, indicating that seated participants reported significantly higher perceived realism (M: 2.24) but also greater susceptibility to simulator sickness, especially in complex visual environments.
Overview
This paper reports a within-subjects user study examining how physical stance (sitting vs. standing) and virtual environment (VE) design jointly shape user experience (UX) in extended reality (XR) climbing. Twenty-five participants completed five randomized climbing scenarios in a Unity3D simulation on the Meta Quest 3, spanning indoor climbing gyms, city rooftops (day and night), and a mountain summit. Interaction was restricted to direct physical climbing via XR controllers—no artificial locomotion—so that visual-vestibular conflict from indirect movement could be excluded as a confound. UX was measured with the Igroup Presence Questionnaire (IPQ) and the Simulator Sickness Questionnaire (SSQ) after each level.
The study addresses two research questions: how VE design influences height perception in XR, and how stance affects overall UX and comfort. The central finding is a comfort–immersion trade-off for seated users: seated participants reported significantly higher perceived realism but also greater susceptibility to simulator sickness in visually complex environments, whereas standing participants maintained stable sickness levels across all scenes.
Methodology
The five environments were designed to vary systematically in elevation, lighting, and spatial complexity: Climbing Gym 1 and Climbing Gym 2 (differing in wall complexity and hold density), City Rooftop Day, City Rooftop Night, and Mountain Summit. Each level lasted approximately 3–5 minutes. Stance alternated between levels, yielding two or three levels per condition per participant; scene order was randomized. After each level, participants completed the IPQ (spatial presence, involvement, experienced realism) and SSQ (nausea, oculomotor strain, disorientation), followed by an open-ended questionnaire on realism, comfort, and perceived height.
Participants (13 female, 12 male; age M = 26.4, SD = 7.6) were recruited without exclusion criteria for fitness, gaming experience, or height sensitivity; twelve had no prior XR experience and none were experienced climbers. Analysis used repeated-measures ANOVA with Mauchly's sphericity and Shapiro–Wilk normality checks, falling back to Friedman tests where assumptions were violated (α=.05).
Key results
Stance affects perceived realism. A significant effect of stance emerged on the IPQ realism subscale (F(1, 114) = 4.79, p = .031), with seated participants reporting higher realism (M = 2.24, SD = 0.95) than standing participants (M = 1.87, SD = 0.84). No other IPQ subscales differed significantly. This is somewhat counterintuitive relative to prior work suggesting standing enhances embodiment [zielasko2021sit], and it implies that perceptual disconnect from vertical movement may paradoxically increase judged realism—at least as operationalized by the IPQ—in physically grounded climbing tasks.
Environmental complexity drives nausea. Nausea varied significantly across environments (F(4, 111) = 4.78, p = .001), peaking in City Nighttime (M = 43.3, SD = 31.1) and lowest in Climbing Gym 1 (M = 13.4, SD = 16.3). Post hoc tests confirmed City Nighttime vs. Climbing Gym 1 (p = .0014) and Mountain vs. Climbing Gym 1 (p = .0417). Because artificial locomotion was absent, the authors attribute these symptoms primarily to visual and spatial complexity rather than movement technique—an attribution consistent with literature linking sensory load to cybersickness [chang2020virtual].
Stance moderates sickness variability. Total SSQ scores did not differ significantly by stance, but seated participants showed greater score variability and elevated discomfort in visually complex scenes, while standing participants remained stable. The practical implication is that standing configurations may be preferable for motion-sensitive users, even at some cost in reported realism.
Limitations and open questions
The paper concedes several constraints explicitly. First, the alternating-stance design produced imbalance: because scene order was randomized rather than fully counterbalanced, some levels appeared more often under one stance condition at particular session times, limiting direct stance-by-environment comparison. Second, the sample of 25 non-climbers constrains generalizability, particularly to populations relevant to training applications. Third, the authors acknowledge they cannot fully rule out contributions from prolonged exposure or subtle mismatches between virtual height cues and body cues when attributing sickness to environmental complexity alone. Finally, individual differences in SSQ responses were large—some participants reported symptoms at low scores, others none at high scores—underscoring the subjective nature of XR discomfort and motivating physiological measures alongside questionnaires.
Open questions left by the study include whether counterbalanced designs would confirm the stance–realism effect, how postural configuration interacts with height exposure over longer sessions, and which specific visual features of complex environments (e.g., lighting conditions, openness, depth cues) drive nausea.
Conclusion
The study provides evidence that user stance subtly but measurably shapes XR climbing experiences: sitting yields slightly higher perceived realism at the cost of increased, environment-dependent simulator sickness, while standing offers more consistent comfort. Environmental complexity—not locomotion technique—emerged as the primary driver of nausea in this physically grounded interaction paradigm. These findings inform design trade-offs between immersion and comfort in vertical XR applications, though the modest sample size and incomplete counterbalancing mean the effects warrant replication under stricter experimental control.
