Mood Worlds: A Virtual Environment for Autonomous Emotional Expression

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

User-Defined Gestures with Physical Props in Virtual Reality

When building virtual reality (VR) environments, designers use physical props to improve immersion and realism. However, people may want to perform actions that would not be supported by physical objects, for example, duplicating an object in a Computer-Aided Design (CAD) program or darkening the sky in an open-world game. In this thesis, I present an elicitation study where I asked 21 participants to choose from 95 props to perform manipulative gestures for 20 referents (actions), typically found in CAD software or open-world games. I describe the resulting gestures as context-free grammars, capturing the actions taken by our participants, their prop choices, and how the props were used in each gesture. I present agreement scores between gesture choices and prop choices; to accomplish the latter, I developed a generalized agreement score that compares sets of selections rather than a single selection, enabling new types of elicitation studies. I found that props were selected according to their resemblance to virtual objects and the actions they afforded; that gesture and prop agreement depended on the referent, with some referents leading to similar gesture choices, while others led to similar prop choices; and that a small set of carefully chosen props can support a wide variety of gestures