This demo presents an educational e-learning module that teaches emotion regulation to medical students in a 3D virtual environment. The scenario focuses on the pressure and stress experienced by students when studying for an exam. The survey results based on 50 university students have shown that the immersive tool is effective to elicit stress and anxiety emotions. Although the majority of students were able to regulate their emotions, half of them used inappropriate strategies to manage their negative emotions.

Virtual Reality (VR) technology enables “embodied interactions” in realistic environments where users can freely move and interact, with deep physical and emotional states. However, a comprehensive understanding of the embodied user experience is currently limited by the extent to which one can make relevant observations, and the accuracy at which observations can be interpreted.

The practitioner-patient relationship (PPR) is essential to the improvement of health care services for patients suffering from cognitive impairments. However, teaching medical students how to develop a healthy PR using conventional approaches is difficult, due to the lack of real context. To address this issue, TeachMod presents a new educational game-based course that offers an interactive and immersive learning through two different scenarios of psychiatric consultations. The course was tested and evaluated with 64 undergraduate students who expressed a positive attitude to the game design and its pedagogical content. The survey results indicate that the course is sufficiently intuitive to foster learning the fundamentals of an ethical and appropriate PPR.

While immersive media have been shown to generate more intense emotions, saliency information has been shown to be a key component for the assessment of their quality, owing to the various portions of the sphere (viewports) a user can attend. In this article, we investigate the tri-partite connection between user attention, user emotion and visual content in immersive environments. To do so, we present a new dataset enabling the analysis of different types of saliency, both low-level and high-level, in connection with the user’s state in 360◦videos. Head and gaze movements are recorded along with self-reports and continuous physiological measurements of emotions. We then study how the accuracy of saliency estimators in predicting user attention depends on user-reported and physiologically-sensed emotional perceptions. Our results show that high-level saliency better predicts user attention for higher levels of arousal. We discuss how this work serves as a first step to understand and predict user attention and intents in immersive interactive environments.

From a user perspective, immersive content can elicit more intense emotions than flat-screen presentations. From a system perspective, efficient storage and distribution remain challenging, and must consider user attention. Understanding the connection between user attention, user emotions and immersive content is therefore key. In this article, we present a new dataset, PEM360 of user head movements and gaze recordings in 360° videos, along with self-reported emotional ratings of valence and arousal, and continuous physiological measurement of electrodermal activity and heart rate. The stimuli are selected to enable the spatiotemporal analysis of the connection between content, user motion and emotion. We describe and provide a set of software tools to process the various data modalities, and introduce a joint instantaneous visualization of user attention and emotion we name Emotional maps. We exemplify new types of analyses the PEM360 dataset can enable. The entire data and code are made available in a reproducible framework.