What is it about?
Access to nature and feeling connected to it are crucial for our mental health and well-being. Sometimes, technology can help provide these experiences when we don't have access to natural environments. While there's research supporting the idea that technology can give us these nature-like experiences, we still don't know exactly how to design them. In this study, we used an agile design approach and drew on self-transcendent emotion theory and transformative experience design to explore how technology can support mental well-being. We created a virtual reality (VR) experience called Awedyssey to counteract the effects of sensory deprivation and demonstrated it publicly. To gather feedback on Awedyssey, we conducted interviews, collected diary entries, and administered surveys to participants. From all the information we collected, we found that there are certain things we need to consider when designing these types of experiences. We need to think about things like making the experience feel real, giving people control, making it feel big and expansive, and making sure it's comfortable. It's important to keep in mind that different people have different preferences and reactions, so it can be challenging to design an experience that works for everyone.
Featured Image
Photo by NASA on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Ultimately, this research aims to enhance our understanding of the intersection between technology and nature in regards to mental well-being and connection. This research explores the potential of VR to offer nature experiences, contributes to the design knowledge of creating impactful technologically-mediated interventions, and gathers user feedback to inform future design decisions. By understanding these design decisions, we can better design technology-mediated experiences that evoke positive emotions and enhance mental well-being, even in the absence of direct access to nature. This research contributes to the growing field of using technology to create meaningful and emotionally engaging experiences that support our mental health.
Perspectives
As access to natural environments may be limited for various reasons, exploring the capacity of technology to offer nature experiences becomes important. By creating technologically-mediated experiences in VR that evoke self-transcendent emotions similar to those experienced in nature, it is interesting to see that we can potentially provide alternative pathways for improving mental well-being, especially for vulnerable populations.
Denise Quesnel
Simon Fraser University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Awedyssey: Design Tensions in Eliciting Self-transcendent Emotions in Virtual Reality to Support Mental Well-being and Connection, July 2023, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3563657.3595998.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
