Multi-granular Analysis and Physiological Interpretations of Heart Rate Variability Metrics During VR-Shooting Difficulty Induced Stress.

Physiological sensing of virtual reality (VR)-induced stressors are increasingly utilized to improve human training and assess the impact of gaming difficulty-induced stress on a person's health and well-being. However, the prior art sparsely explores the multi-level cardiovascular dynamics for psychophysiological demands in a VR environment. This treatise discusses the experimental findings and physiological interpretations of various heart rate variability (HRV) metrics extracted from 31 participants during a Go/No-Go VR-based shooting task across multiple timeframes. The VR-shooting exercise consists of firing at the enemy targets while sparing the friendly ones for different shooting difficulty levels: low-difficulty and high-difficulty with in-between baselines. Ex-perimental results demonstrate consistent shooting difficulty-induced stress patterns at multi-granular levels in response to the heterogeneous inputs (exogenous and endogenous factors). The physiological interpretations highlight the intricate inter-play between cardio-physiological components: sympathetic and parasympathetic response across multiple timescales (sessions and blocks) and shooting difficulty levels.