A Semiotic Study on Virtual Reality Games and Simulations

Virtual reality systems are computational environments that encompass a style of human-computer interaction, to which the objects that the user is exposed to are interpreted according to the experience and culture of the user. Currently, virtual environments are employed in many areas, such as architecture and medicine. The convergence is due to three main factors: decrease of the cost of computational equipment, increase of the performance of processors and development of efficient algorithms for computer graphics. The development of environments for virtual reality games and simulations is extremely important to reach the target audience of that application. This work has the objective to analyze semiotically how objects in virtual reality environments are interpreted by users and to draw patterns to help the development of targeted environments. Three experiments were applied to the users, and these experiments obtained good results regarding the tangibility of the applications, the interference of culture and experience in the interpretation of the objects in the scenario and patterns taken from the genre of the volunteers.