VREmote

Interaction, the degree to which users of a medium can influence the content of the environment, is one of the key features of Virtual Reality, yet there has been surprisingly little research on its effect in evoking emotions. Virtual Reality technologies are advancing at a rapid pace and becoming more readily available for wider use, so finding ways to improve this experience, either for therapy or entertainment is important. This project focuses on the creation of environments that elicit fear and sadness, with the ability to manipulate the amount of interaction between the participant and the environment, as well as the use of Artificial Intelligence that reacts to the participant’s actions by dynamically altering its behavior. The environments and artificial intelligence were evaluated by experts in the field of Virtual Reality through heuristic evaluations. The environments were able to manipulate the amount of interaction that occurred successfully with few flaws in how it was executed, and the artificial intelligence was believable and dynamic. Our results indicate that the environment is suitable for use in future iterations, with slight modications for optimal user testing.