# Current Perceptions of Virtual Reality Technology
## 3 Results and Discussion
### Why and How Do People Use VR? Only a minority of participants had not tried VR before (32.63%). Of these, the most likely reason was the lack of opportunity (Figure 3), which coincides with the behavioural control predictor of the TPB. Other, less common themes were not being able to afford it and not having any interest in trying the technology. Additionally, one participant gave the reasoning that the technology _\"doesn't appeal to me. Don't like the idea of not knowing what's going on around me while having a headset on\"_. These themes are most consistent with those of the VR-HAM, although not all themes from any of the acceptance models were presented as reasons by any one individual. Of the 97 who had tried VR, only 4 reported using it often, 14 used it sometimes, and 79 used it rarely. There were no prompts in this question, so the participants were to decide for themselves what these categories of time meant, and these are shown in Figure 4a. This appears at odds with other findings from previous research [78] that 50% of participants used VR weekly. That particular study, however, used snowball sampling on LinkedIn; therefore, direct comparisons should not be made given that the sample populations were so different. A related question was asked to those who had reported trying VR before, which was when the last time they had used it (Figure 5): only one person reported to have used VR the same day as taking the questionnaire, and only one person had used it the day prior. For the other response options on when they had last used the technology: a few days ago \(n=6\), a week ago \(n=4\), a few weeks ago \(n=9\), over a month ago \(n=33\), and for so long ago I can't remember when it was, was the most common response (\(n=43\)). Figure 4: (**a**) Frequency of how often participants use VR. (**b**) Frequency of the reported uses of VR equipment. Owning a VR device was not common: 14.58% of the sample owned a VR headset, and only three people owned more than one device. No one owned three or more. Of those who had tried VR, 91.75% enjoyed using it. The most common of the pre-set uses for VR was for recreational purposes (66.10%), followed by education (16.10%), and the least common reported option was for business purposes (2.54%), which are displayed in Figure 4b. Only 15.25% of individuals responded in a free-text answer for other purposes; however, these included 'entertainment', 'gaming', and 'fun', which can be classified under the theme of recreation. A use for research appeared seven times, which could be included under the theme of business. Available content was voted as the most important factor for VR, closely followed by the purchase price. Figure 6 depicts this, along with the less common responses of how customisable the technology is and its popularity. Popularity could be argued to be related to the social norms predictor in the TRA and TAM. Both of these models found it to significantly predict usage, in contrast with the low importance attached to it in the responses found here. Participants were asked whether or not they agreed with eight statements that could be used to describe VR technology. Figure 7 plots the responses to these Likert questions: there were few extreme responses (strongly disagree or strongly agree) for these questions. The results of the Wilcoxon signed-rank tests are shown in Table 1. These results show that VR devices were perceived to be easy and enjoyable to use, necessary, but also bulky. Figure 5: Frequency of the last time participants used VR. Figure 6: Frequency of the option chosen to be the most important feature for VR. Perceived ease of use has been found to have a direct effect on intention to use [109]; however, other studies found this effect to actually be mediated by perceived usefulness [110]. A more recent study found that perceived usefulness was the most important factor [111]. Here, however, both ease of use and usefulness were not considered to be among the most important characteristics of VR (Figure 7).