Affective Interactions Using Virtual Reality: The Link between Presence and Emotions

Abstract

Many studies showed the ability of movies and imagery techniques to elicit emotions. Nevertheless, it is less clear how to manipulate the content of interactive media to induce specific emotional responses. In particular, this is true for the emerging medium virtual reality (VR), whose main feature is the ability to induce a feeling of "presence" in the computer-generated world experienced by the user. The main goal of this study was to analyze the possible use of VR as an affective medium. Within this general goal, the study also analyzed the relationship between presence and emotions. The results confirmed the efficacy of VR as affective medium: the interaction with "anxious" and "relaxing" virtual environments produced anxiety and relaxation. The data also showed a circular interaction between presence and emotions: on one side, the feeling of presence was greater in the "emotional" environments; on the other side, the emotional state was influenced by the level of presence. The significance of these results for the assessment of affective interaction is discussed.

Emotions and the Emotional Valence Afforded by the Virtual Environment

“…Previous findings have shown a correlation between emotions and presence (Riva et al, 2007;Robillard et al, 2003) and a bidirectional relationship between these constructs Michaud et al, 2004;Riva et al, 2007). Riva et al (2007) showed that positive and negative mood could be efficiently induced by immersions in carefully designed virtual environments.…”

“…Visiting a mythological Egyptian temple may represent a positive experience for most participants in the sample. It is important to point out however that virtual environments used by other researchers to induce positive mood (Banos et al, 2004;Riva et al, 2007) were especially designed to have a strong positive valence. No such efforts were invested in the current environment and, therefore, it was not expected to have such a soothing effect.…”

“…Changes in the level of anxiety felt and in the feeling of presence were also strongly and significantly correlated. Using multilevel hierarchical linear regression analyses, Riva et al (2007) suggested the existence of a bidirectional relationship between emotions and presence. Based on these sophisticated analyses, their study suggests that anxiety is not only a predictor of presence, but the level of presence is also a significant predictor of the level of anxiety.…”

“…In some cases, the virtual environments were carefully designed to induce emotions (Banos et al, 2004;Robillard & al., 2003). It is hard to see how an experimenter could create a mismatch between an emotion and the expected valence of a virtual environment by using procedures from Banos al (2004) or Riva et al (2007) who used the virtual environment to induce the emotion. The alternative strategy is to induce the mood prior to the immersion, as Bouchard et al (2008) did.…”

On the influence of individual characteristics and personality traits on the user experience with multi-sensorial media: an experimental insight

“…Presence has been found to be strongly related to the capability of a mediated environment -including 3DTV, videogames and artistic and cultural heritage virtual environments (VEs) -to elicit emotions [61,90] and, in particular, enjoyment [73,85]. In consequence, an enhanced sense of Presence is considered to have a direct impact on the adoption potential of these applications.…”