• Older gardeners participated in co-creating, sharing, and viewing narrated VR garden tours. • VR garden tours fostered a sense of connection and community through shared passions. • The tours enabled gardeners to showcase creativity and be inspired by others. • Viewers experienced a strong sense of presence, feeling as if they were “in the garden.” • A participatory VR storytelling framework outlines key roles and elements in the process. Virtual reality (VR) technology is being used in diverse ways to enable older adults to reminisce and connect. An underexplored area is the use of VR for creating and sharing personally meaningful stories. This paper examines the use of VR technology to help nine older adults share and experience others’ stories about their gardens. Through a co-design approach involving home visits, interviews, and a workshop, we examined older gardeners’ perceptions and experiences of co-creating, sharing, and viewing narrated 3D garden tours captured with a VR camera. Our findings demonstrate that participants showcased the meaning, creativity, and expertise associated with their gardens and gardening practices through the VR garden tours. Viewing the garden tours created by others fostered a sense of connection among participants through shared passions and interests. Participants valued the authenticity and individuality of the tours, perceiving them as avenues for learning, inspiration, and motivation. Viewers experienced a strong sense of presence in the garden tours, particularly due to the spatial immersion, holistic perspectives, the first-person view, and the ability to exert control in the VR system. The study reveals opportunities to enhance the VR garden tour experience, including increasing sociality, improving usability and guidance, and building communities around the tours. Drawing from these insights, we develop a framework to guide future practices of conducting participatory VR storytelling with older adults. The framework outlines three critical roles involved in the process: Storyteller, Facilitator, and Audience. It also discusses five key elements that need to be considered: Intention, Narrative, Medium, Context, and Engagement.

Recent innovations in digital technology offer significant opportunities for older adults to engage in meaningful activities. To investigate older adults’ perceptions of using existing and emerging technologies for meaningful activities, we conducted three participatory design workshops and follow-up interviews with adults aged over 65. The workshops encompassed discussions on existing technologies for meaningful activities, demonstrations of emerging technologies such as VR, AR, and AI, and design activities including prototyping and storyboarding. Our findings show that while participants had diverse interpretations of meaningful activities, they sought to use technologies to support continuity in the pursuit of these activities. Specifically, participants highlighted the importance of safe aging at home, which provides a pathway for meaningful activities in later life. We further discuss participants’ discerning attitudes when assessing the use of different technologies for meaningful activities and several values and attributes they desire when envisioning future technologies, including simplicity, positivity, proactivity, and integration.

Restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic significantly affected people's opportunities to engage in activities that are meaningful to their lives. In response to these constraints, many people, including older adults, turned to digital technologies as alternative ways to pursue meaningful activities. These technology-mediated activities, however, presented new challenges for older adults’ everyday use of technology. In this paper, we investigate how older adults used digital technologies for meaningful activities during COVID-19 restrictions. We conducted in-depth interviews with 40 older adults and analyzed the interview data through the lens of self-determination theory (SDT). Our analysis shows that using digital technologies for meaningful activities can both support and undermine older people's three basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. We argue that future technologies should be designed to empower older adults’ content creation, engagement in personal interests, exploration of technology, effortful communication, and participation in beneficent activities.

Restrictions arising from the COVID-19 pandemic have limited opportunities for older people to participate in face-to-face organised social activities. Many organisations moved these activities online, but little is known about older adults' experiences of participating in those activities. This paper reports an investigation of older adults' experiences of participating in social activities that they used to attend in-person, but which were moved online because of strict lockdown restrictions. We conducted in-depth interviews with 40 older adults living independently (alone or with others). Findings from a reflexive thematic analysis show that online social activities were important during the pandemic for not only staying connected to other people but also helping older adults stay engaged in meaningful activities, including arts, sports, cultural, and civic events. Online activities provided older adults with opportunities to connect with like-minded people; share care, encouragement, and support; participate in civic agendas; learn knowledge and develop new skills; and experience entertainment, distraction, and mental stimulation. Our participants had diverse perceptions of the transition from in-person to online social activities. Based on the findings, we present a taxonomy of multi-layered meaningful activities for older adults' digital social participation and highlight implications for future technology design.