Is VR mainstream yet? A survey of the Norwegian public’s familiarity, acceptance, and use

Summary

Despite the long history of virtual reality (VR) technology and its current availability, it remains unclear how the general public perceives and uses the technology. To shed light on this, we conducted a panel survey with 931 respondents in the spring of 2021. The survey revealed that while most people knew what VR is, only 20% had tried it; even among the age groups below 40 years, the share with VR experience ranged from 34 to 54%. Moreover, the vast majority were infrequent users, only 0.6% of the full sample used VR weekly. Reasons provided for not trying VR were mainly related to either lack of interest or lack of opportunity, while infrequent usage seemed to be linked to poor user experience. User experience was in turn tied to sound and image quality, novelty, usability, content, responsiveness and cybersickness symptoms such as vertigo and nausea. This suggests that those who are already familiar with VR require high technical quality as well as high creative quality if they are to adopt VR as a consumer technology.