A Review of Emotion-Aware Adaptive Virtual Reality Games for Player Emotional Profiling and Intelligent Personalization

The idea behind emotion-aware and adaptive virtual reality (VR) games is to provide better user experience through dynamic changes in game mechanics based on users’ emotions and behaviors. The current state of research on VR games includes such topics as dynamic difficulty adjustment, physiological sensing, facial electromyography, electroencephalography, and adaptation driven by engagement. This paper summarizes existing research articles focused on affective profiling of VR players and adaptation in VR games regarding methods used, modeling approaches applied, adaptive algorithms implemented, and obtained results. Although many positive outcomes are claimed in current research papers, there are some limitations due to small sample sizes, short session times, lack of real-time multimodal approach, and insufficient ecological validity.