Hello everyone, my name is Holger Klapperich and today I‘m presenting the late breaking
work with the titel „Trash it, Punch it, Burn it“ which I wrote with my Co-authors
Florian Grieger and Marc Hassenzahl. Together we explored in Marcs workgroup „ubiquitous
design“ at the university of Siegen, how virtual reality could be used to support coping
with negative thoughts
The number of text messages rose over the past few years, not only in our private live
but also in our working live.
In Germany people aged between 30 and 49, receive 21 business Emails per day in average.
Not all messages we receive in our leisure or working time are intended to be positive
or neutral.
Those negative text messages could lead to negative thoughts, which are widespread and
can have serious health consequences, such as chronical stress.
A possible solution for this could be a technological everyday interventions, because they could
detect and act instantly on negative influences.
Especially Virtual Reality (VR) as a medium is of interest, because through its immersion
users could easily reflect on their negative thoughts without distraction.
We created two explorative VR-prototypes, which we call Positivity and Trash-it, based
on personally relevant text-messages.
We would like the users to manipulate text messages in VR with physical manipulations
through gestures.
In the first scenario Positivity a message is changed to something more visually and
semantically positive,
by changing the font and striking out words.
And in the second scenario „Trash It, punch it, burn it“ different active gestures,
such as crumbling, punching, stabbing are used to get rid of the message in a more interactive
way.
In an qualitative empirical exploration with ten participants we collected first insights
of the concept.
To Sum up the results in general
A positive shift in negative thoughts could be found and a relaxing and self-reflective
effect was reported. The gestures were perceived positively and
half of the participants felt more self-determined. The VR technology had a positive effect, based
on its immersive and focusing character. Most of the participants could imagine using
such a system in their everyday life as an immediate intervention after receiving a negative
message
In the Positivity scenario positive cognitive effects were created, such
as providing an opportunity for re-evaluating besides making negative thoughts feel less
personal While changing thoughts to the positive, made
the participants being more objective about the problem at hand.
While theTrash It scenario was more polarizing, because some participants
found it too forceful, while others described it as helpful to down-regulate their negative
emotions.
To sum up:
Personalized content makes the reflection on negative emotions more accessible and self-relevant.
Therefore an immersive medium, such as VR, focuses users in a way they can fully engage
with the intervention, which seems to be key to its success.
Based on the interaction design and embodied cognition, such as gestures, can have effects
on thoughts/emotions and some participants felt more self-determined.
There is a demand to integrate such technology-mediated interventions into daily routines, for everyday
life problems but also into working contexts.
Thank you for your attention and now I‘m happy to answer your questions.