In our daily lives, we are exposed to various stressors, which, even in mild forms, can lead to serious health issues when prolonged. Dance Movement Therapy (DMT) uses bodily movement as psychotherapy to improve health and well-being; however, traditional DMT requires therapists, specific setups, and physical props, limiting daily accessibility. To address this, we conducted a formative study with 10 DMT experts and developed ImmersiveDMT, a VR application that provides real-time visual and auditory feedback in response to users’ movements. A user study with 56 participants examined how visual, auditory, and audiovisual feedback affect expressive movement and stress reduction compared to a non-responsive immersive baseline. Results showed that auditory and audiovisual conditions induced significantly more expressive movement compared to baseline. Both visual and auditory feedback achieved significant stress reduction below baseline (V: 17.1%, p=.004; A: 16.6%, p=.042), while combined audiovisual feedback led to less stress reduction. This research presents a novel approach to accessible daily stress management by integrating VR and DMT, demonstrating new possibilities for self-directed mental health support.

Virtual Reality (VR) enables the low-cost production of realistic prototypes of buildings at early stages of architectural projects. Such prototypes may be used to gather the experiences of future users and iterate early on the design. However, it is essential to evaluate whether what is experienced within such VR prototypes corresponds to what will be experienced in reality. Here, we use an innovative method to compare the experiences of patients in a real building and in a virtual environment that plays the role of a prototype that could have been created by architects during design phase. We first designed and implemented a VR environment replicating an existing ambulatory pathway. Then, we used micro-phenomenological interviews to collect the experiences of real patients in the VR environment (n=8), along with VR traces and first-person videos and in the real ambulatory pathway (n=8). We modeled and normalized the experiences, and compared them systematically. Results suggest that patients live comparable experiences along various dimensions of experience such as thought, emotion, sensation, social and sensory perceptions, and that VR prototypes may be adequate to assess issues with architectural design. This work opens unique perspectives towards involving patients in User-Centered Design in architecture, though challenges lie ahead on how to design VR prototypes from early blueprints of architects.

Preparing a new dance performance involves more than learning individual steps. We are interested in understanding how dancers collaborate as they rehearse a new dance piece, with a particular emphasis on how they use physical and digital artifacts to support this process. We conducted a 12-month longitudinal observational study with a dance company that re-staged a dance piece, taken from the contemporary repertoire and unknown to the dancers. The study focused on the role that artifacts play in shaping the learning of a dance piece. We showed how dancers produced an ecology of artifacts with the aim of analyzing the choreographic ideas behind the dance and sharing them with other learners. We showed that sharing these artifacts was challenging because they are idiosyncratic and embody their creator perspective and vocabulary. We then illustrated how dancers overcome this challenge by compiling artifacts and distributing the learning task among the group in order to create a common knowledge of the piece which improves the learning process. We conclude with design opportunities for technologies supporting long-term dance learning processes.

Our goal is to understand how dancers learn complex dance phrases. We ran three workshops where dancers learned dance fragments from videos. In workshop 1, we analyzed how dancers structure their learning strategies by decomposing movements. In workshop 2, we introduced MoveOn, a technology probe that lets dancers decompose video into short, repeatable clips to support their learning. This served as an effective analysis tool for identifying the changes in focus and understanding their decomposition and recomposition processes. In workshop 3, we compared the teacher's and dancers' decomposition strategies, and how dancers learn on their own compared to teacher-created decompositions. We found that they all ungroup and regroup dance fragments, but with different foci of attention, which suggests that teacher-imposed decomposition is more effective for introductory dance students, whereas personal decomposition is more suitable for expert dancers. We discuss the implications for designing technology to support analysis, learning and teaching of dance through movement decomposition.