Eyes on Immersive Search: Eye-Tracking Study of Search Engine Result Pages in Immersive Virtual Environments

User interactions with search engine result pages (SERPs) are well researched in desktop and mobile computing environments. However, relatively little work has focused on how users interact with SERPs presented in 3D immersive virtual environments (IVEs) using virtual reality head-mounted displays (VR HMDs). While 2D displays have well-understood methods to present search results (e.g., ranked lists of 10 blue links), 3D IVEs do not yet have established paradigms for presenting search results. In this paper, we present results from a within-subjects user study to investigate users’ interactions, eye-tracking behaviors, and preferences for four different display arrangements of search results (vertical list, 3x3 grid, 4x4 grid, 4x4 sphere) in a VR HMD across two different task types (find all relevant, pick 3 best). 32 participants completed 5 search trials in 8 experimental conditions (4 displays x 2 task types). Our results show that: (1) participants had a positional bias for the top or top left of SERPs, (2) they perceived the list display as requiring more effort, (3) they perceived a result ordering in the list display but not in the other displays, and (4) they showed a wider variety of navigational patterns in the 4x4 displays that did not require scrolling. We describe implications of the results and insights for presenting search results to users in HMD environments.