Mood Worlds: A Virtual Environment for Autonomous Emotional Expression
Wagener, Nadine and Niess, Jasmin and Rogers, Yvonne and Schöning, Johannes
Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Immersive interactive technologies such as virtual reality (VR) have the potential to foster well-being. While VR applications have been successfully used to evoke positive emotions through the presetting of light, colour and scenery, the experiential potential of allowing users to independently create a virtual environment (VE) has not yet been sufficiently addressed. To that end, we explore how the autonomous design of a VE can affect emotional engagement and well-being. We present Mood Worlds – a VR application allowing users to visualise their emotions by self-creating a VE. In an exploratory evaluation (N=16), we found that Mood Worlds is an effective tool supporting emotional engagement. Additionally, we found that an autonomous creation process in VR increases positive emotions and well-being. Our work shows that VR can be an effective tool to visualise emotions, thereby increasing positive affect. We discuss opportunities and design requirements for VR as positive technology.
2022
inproceedings
Association for Computing Machinery
CHI '22
OFFIS Autoren
