**1. Introduction**

Most of us would agree that uncertainty, in many circumstances, is not something we like to experience. For example, we do not wish to be uncertain about our ability to pay bills at the end of each month, our work and educational prospects, and our health [1]. Some studies in neuroscience also support this claim by providing evidence that the human brain is hardwired to interpret uncertainty as a danger and respond to it with fear and stress [2,3]. A human brain under uncertainty tends to overestimate and dramatize danger [4], jump to conclusions [5], and underestimate its ability to handle it [6–8].

Following this approach to uncertainty, the goal has been to reduce it [9,10]. For example, people are encouraged to reduce the uncertainty of loss of income in old age or of possible unemployment with saving money, paying taxes, and buying insurance policies [1]. In education, traditionally, uncertainty is often seen as a threat and removed by exposing students to clearly defined problems, following predefined methods of solving them, to reach expected outcomes [11]. The reality is that we live in an uncertain and complex

**Citation:** Hajahmadi, S.; Marfia, G. Effects of the Uncertainty of Interpersonal Communications on Behavioral Responses of the Participants in an Immersive Virtual Reality Experience: A Usability Study. *Sensors* **2023**, *23*, 2148. https:// doi.org/10.3390/s23042148

Academic Editors: Pietro Manzoni, Claudio Palazzi and Ombretta Gaggi

Received: 29 December 2022 Revised: 2 February 2023 Accepted: 6 February 2023 Published: 14 February 2023

**Copyright:** © 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

world [1]. Despite our best efforts, things do not always go as planned, and unexpected events may happen. Hence, one should strive to accept uncertainty, performing tasks aware of its existence instead of amplifying its fear with the risk of arguing with life rather than living it. The recent experience with COVID-19 supports such an idea [12]. This is why many educators have recently sought the best ways to provide a structured and supportive learning environment to prepare young students to respond productively to the challenges originating from dealing with uncertainty [13,14]. As described by Beghetto [15], novel learning environments should structurally offer uncertainty, engaging students with it, teaching them how to sit with its difficulty, how to explore, how to generate and evaluate new possibilities, and, most importantly, take action based on them [16]. In this way, uncertainty may act as a catalyst for creative answers rather than an unbeatable barrier. This approach motivates the idea of designing and implementing platforms to support the study of the behavioral responses that the uncertainty may trigger [12,17,18].

The broad concept of uncertainty is, in fact, closely connected with that of information which, in turn, is at the core of interpersonal communications [19,20]. Interpersonal communication concerns the study of social interaction between people and tries to understand how verbal and written dialogues, as well as nonverbal actions, are used to achieve communication goals [21]. Studies show individuals facing different levels of uncertainty have different behavioral responses, from negative to positive [22–24]. The ways a human being may deal with an uncertain situation may differ based on individual differences [25], culture [26], and the level of expertise [27]. Hillen et al presented a conceptualization of an individual's experience of uncertainty based on a categorization of potential responses [28]. In such a model, ambiguities or/and complexities generate(s) stimuli to the information system. Uncertainties appear when individuals perceive (consciously become aware of) their existence. Cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses then follow such a perception.

Virtual Reality (VR) systems may act as feasible platforms to assist in understanding behavioral responses to the uncertainty of interpersonal communications, as they may provide 3D spaces involving the same kind of navigational and communication challenges experienced in the real world [29]. With VR, it is possible to create structured environments where the ability of people to cope with challenges can be observed, behavioral data gathered, eventual achievements and feedback engineered, and strategies for skill improvement applied in a top-down fashion [30–33]. In VR, people can express their ideas, feel in control, and accomplish tasks and communicate with others [34–37]. This raises the potential to enjoy and engage in activities in the digital space and then apply them to the real world to improve one's social well-being [38]. In addition, creating such an experience in the context of a serious game can support situated cognition by contextualizing a player's experience in an engaging and realistic environment [39]. In addition, it can benefit from those game design techniques that support the idea that uncertainty could potentially maintain a user's attention and engagement, providing the motivation to continue even in challenging moments [1].

Considering this domain, we propose the design and development of an immersive virtual reality experience whose scope is to support the investigation of how people manage uncertainty while performing tasks in a workplace scenario. This experience, implemented as a serious game, aims at simulating a workplace scenario, a social environment where successinmanagingeffectiveinterpersonalcommunicationappearsveryimportant[40–44].

With this work, we aim to contribute to the research community by providing answers to the research questions below:


This paper is structured as follows. Section 2 discusses related work. Section 3 describes the interaction techniques, environment, and task design process of this immersive VR serious game. Section 4 describes the result of a usability study that evaluates the user experience of the proposed VR system as well as reports some behavioral responses. Section 5 discusses the main findings of the experiment. Section 6 concludes the paper and discusses future opportunities for research.

### **2. Related Work**

In this section, we present and discuss the works that fall closest to our contribution. A good body of research has focused on the study of "Navigational uncertainty" and its effect on the user's spatial navigation performance and behavior [45–48]. In this area of research, uncertainty has been mostly introduced into the system by creating a perception of disorientation [49] and curing conflict [50] for the user, resulting in an increase in his/her information-seeking behavior. In their recent review, Keller et al. [51] proposed that collecting and analyzing continuous navigational data obtained from the participants in virtual reality experiences that create navigational uncertainty can potentially provide important insight into their information-seeking behavior. For example, in this research [46], the authors focused on the "Looking around behavior" as a common type of information-seeking behavior of participants when experiencing navigational uncertainty. They recorded continuously the heading direction and tried to find its relation to navigational success measures. From this body of literature, we could conclude the potential and importance of the data that could be captured from VR experiences to provide insights into the behavioral responses of people, especially in the study of the effects of a variable, such as uncertainty, on behavior.

Another area in which the study of uncertainty has received a lot of attention is gaming. As Costikyan et al. [1] claim, games could improve by purposefully applying the concept of uncertainty in their designs. Uncertainty could act as a catalyst to hold users' attention and interest; mastering it may help pursue a game's goal in an efficient and non-threatening way [52]. In addition, Costikyan et al. [1] support these claims by citing the sociologist Roger Callios [53] "Play is... uncertain activity. Doubt must remain until the end, and hinges upon the denouement... every game of skill, by definition, involves the risk for the player of missing his stroke and the threat of defeat, without which the game would no longer be pleasing. The game is no longer pleasing to one who, because he is too well trained or skillful, wins effortlessly and infallibly".

In the following, we review some examples of games that exploit uncertainty in their design and present a comparison of their features in Table 1:

•Gone Home [54] is a first-person exploration game designed to put players in unknown situations, engaging them to stay and accomplish some tasks, such as uncovering the narration by non-linear progression through searching the space. This game puts a player in the shoes of a young woman who returns home and finds that her family is absent. As Veale et al. [55] also discussed, Gone Home is a video game that uses effective storytelling to create empathy and a sense of responsibility in users by placing them within a recent historical moment. In this way, it exposes the user to the positive and negative elements of the past and encourages him/her to stay in the game and reflect on these elements [56]. While not strong on interactivity, the game through a careful visual, spatial, and audio design of the environment leads its users to explore the house along a twisting, uncertain path and find out what happened to the woman's family through an analysis of imperfect clues from the memorabilia, journals, and other items left around the various rooms. During the experience, there are notes, voices, and letters from or to her family that motivate and guide her in the exploration. These items of cues can be kept in the inventory and reviewed whenever desired [54]. Considering an interest in the study of navigational behaviors of users, Bonnie Ruberg [57] argues that with a deeper analysis of the interactive elements of the game, the player path is linear instead of meandering despite what it seems the

game encourages players to do. The path is already set and the locked, or hidden doors prevent the user to have access to some areas unless they trigger an event or find an object that unlocks this barrier in a predefined order.


To the best of our knowledge, no previous work took full advantage of the available technologies, such as virtual reality, to induce structured uncertainty and investigate the influence of uncertainty levels on human behavior with a focus on interpersonal communications. Our study tries to take this step from within the design and development of such an application by applying some of the design techniques inspired by the previous games in this area and virtual reality techniques that improve the user experience and the study of behavior.


**Table 1.** Key features of the games reviewed in the related work section.

### **3. Experimental Setting**

In this section, we describe the experiment we conducted to study the effects of different levels of uncertainty on behavioral responses, performance, and quality of the experience of the participants resorting to objective and subjective measures. Figure 1 visualizes the stages of this experimental design.

**Figure 1.** The stages of the experimental design.
