The advent of affordable Virtual Reality (VR) technology has spurred consumer and commercial interest in VR relaxation applications, which has quickly grown into a popular non-gaming genre on digital marketplaces. While laboratory studies have demonstrated efficacy of VR relaxation for mental health purposes, little is known about how users experience this type of intervention and no study has examined the reception of consumer versions among regular users in everyday life. Studying published user reviews offers a unique window into naturalistic user experiences that complements traditional qualitative methods by circumventing the sampling bias of interview studies, and allowing analyses on full samples, unconstrained by coding resources. Using an innovative, semi-automated Natural Language Processing technique, the current study analyzed 1379 published reviews (including star ratings) of 30 different VR relaxation applications available for the Oculus Go and Gear VR. The uncovered topic structure and sentiment analysis thereof suggests that users have an overall positive view of VR relaxation applications, describing them as successful in inducing immersion and relaxation, and having appreciated gamification elements. However, perceived quality varied substantially between applications that explained more variance in star ratings than specific features. Critical issues raised were both technical (e.g. “overheating”) in nature and related to specific design elements and use. Implications for the design of consumer VR applications and future research are discussed.

负担得起的虚拟现实（VR）技术的出现激发了消费者和商业对VR放松应用程序的兴趣，而VR放松应用程序已迅速发展成为数字市场上流行的非游戏类型。虽然实验室研究已经证明了VR放松对于心理健康的功效，但对于用户如何体验这种干预方式知之甚少，而且还没有研究检查日常生活中普通用户对消费者版本的接受程度。研究已发布的用户评论为了解自然主义用户体验提供了一个独特的窗口，通过规避访谈研究的抽样偏差，并允许对完整样本进行分析（不受编码资源的约束），从而补充了传统的定性方法。使用创新的半自动自然语言处理技术，当前的研究分析了O379 Go和Gear VR可用的30种不同的VR放松应用程序的1379条已发表评论（包括星级）。未发现的主题结构及其情感分析表明，用户对VR放松应用程序总体上持肯定态度，将其描述为成功地诱导沉浸和放松，并具有游戏化元素。但是，应用之间的感知质量差异很大，这解释了星级评定中比特定特征更多的差异。提出的关键问题既是技术性问题（例如“过热”），又涉及特定的设计元素和用途。讨论了消费者VR应用程序设计的含义和未来的研究。