The imprisonment of parents has severe consequences for their relationship to their children. Thus, ensuring valuable contact between them is crucial for parent's social rehabilitation and children's development and well-being. However, visits are often not child-friendly and lack interaction. We see social VR as a means to address these issues. In this paper, we share findings of a user-centered design process of a virtual reality application that allows imprisoned parents to meet their children. Our pilot study with four dyads of children and imprisoned fathers revealed that both appreciated the virtual visits, felt close to each other, and had a positive emotional experience, although fathers missed physical contact. Children preferred VR's playful and interactive nature compared to regular visits. Our research presents virtual visits as a suitable alternative to ensure valuable social interaction between prisoners and their children and contribute to the potential of immersive virtual social experiences for sensitive use cases.

Engaging in digital games, in particular, using highly immersive VR technology, has emerged as a coping mechanism to escape negative feelings and create positive emotions. It is, therefore, interesting to investigate which mechanisms in digital games influence players’ emotions. One potential mechanism is using virtual characters as companions, as they can positively affect the emotional state and the player experience. However, the impact of the virtual character’s specific emotions on the players has been studied less. The presence of others can positively influence people and improve their well-being when in a bad emotional state. According to the Emotional Contagion theory, the presence of positive-minded others can achieve these positive effects or, following the Emotional Similarity theory, also by the presence of negative-minded others. Therefore, we want to investigate how virtual characters in different emotional states affect the players when they are sad and immerse themselves in a game. Hence, we posed the following research question: "How do different emotions of a virtual character affect emotional state, player experience, and connectedness when players are in a sad emotional state?". Our lab study with 75 participants put in a sad emotional state, revealed significant differences between playing a cooperative VR game with either a happy or a sad virtual character regarding participants’ emotional state and connectedness, but not regarding player experience. We discuss the results and implications of emotional virtual characters to enhance well-being.

The presence of virtual characters in digital games influences players’ experiences; however, the specific impact of various emotional states exhibited by these characters remains unclear. Theories like Emotional Contagion and Emotional Similarity seek to elucidate how the emotions of others affect our own: We might let the emotional state of others infect us, or our emotions may be intensified when others exhibit similar feelings. In the gaming context, we pondered: What impact does playing a horror game alongside a confident virtual character, compared to an anxious one, have on players’ emotional states and experiences? We conducted a lab study with 69 participants and compared a VR horror game played with either a confident or anxious virtual character or alone. Horror games were chosen for their ability to evoke intense emotions, like fear. Our results show that participants could accurately recognize the emotional states portrayed by the virtual character. The horror game significantly increased fear and positive affect, according to the nature of this genre. Not in line with expectations, there was no significant difference between groups regarding player experience and emotional state. We discuss these findings and explore implications for emotional virtual characters within and beyond gaming contexts.

The use of simulation patient programs in the education of child and adolescent psychiatrists is limited by their low availability, high cost, and questionable authenticity and accuracy. To address this issue, we are developing a playful VR interaction with an autonomous agent, a virtual young patient with depression, providing a standardized and safe tool for medical students to practice their diagnosis skills. We follow a participatory design process and directly involve the target group in the development to ensure that the tool meets their needs. We focused on two aspects: the virtual agent's emotionality and the user-agent interaction. The user study results show actual application and agent design requirements. Further, we present the challenges of the first prototypical implementations of young agents and outline future research visions.

Motivation and high effort in exergames are still open to optimization. In reality, coaches can stimulate athletes' engagement by infecting them with their emotions. However, whether these emotion-influencing effects also occur with virtual coaches remains unclear. In the present study, we measured the emotional state, motivation, and performance (punch speed) of 47 participants playing a VR exergame with an emotional (happy/angry) or neutral virtual coach. Results show that the happy and angry coach significantly affected the players' emotions. Furthermore, interacting with the emotional coaches leads to higher motivation, whereas the angry coach causes a reduction of feeling related. Also, we found a significant positive correlation between the increase in anger and punch speed. Our results show that adding an emotional component to virtual coaches into exergames is promising for increasing motivation and performance. This study highlights the positive effects of emotional virtual characters for improving VR exergames and, therefore, players' health.

Exergames can increase cognitive performance compared to sedentary games and the same non-gamified exercise. Whether this advantage can be further enhanced by the high immersion and arousal level VR systems offer remains unclear. Therefore, we developed an exergame that can be played in VR or in front of a TV screen with identical gameplay in both versions. In a study with 32 participants, we collected data on cognitive performance, arousal, presence, motivation, and exertion. Our results show no difference in cognitive performance and arousal between the conditions. However, the VR version significantly increased players' presence and motivation while significantly reducing perceived exertion. Our results help to understand in which aspects VR can have a significant impact on exergames.

Within this paper, we want to present a new game concept that combines VR technology and gaze control to direct and train attention in ADHD children. Our approach combines the motivating ability of games with attention-demanding tasks, gaze control, and the high level of immersion of Virtual Reality to design a fun training game for children with ADHD. We describe our design process and give design recommendations for creating games with gaze control and games for children with ADHD.

We present online survey results on social virtual reality (social VR) users' activities and usage motives. Based on content analysis of users' free-text responses, we found that most users, in fact, use these applications for social activities and to satisfy diverse social needs. The second most frequently mentioned categories of activities and motives relate to experiential aspects such as entertainment activities. Another important category of motives, which has only recently been described in related work, relates to the self, such as personal growth. Our results indicate that while social VR provides a superior social experience than traditional digital social spaces, like games or social media, users still desire better and affordable tracking technology, increased sensory immersion, and further improvement concerning social features. These findings complement related work as they come from a comparatively large sample (N= 273) and summarize a general user view on social VR. Besides confirming an intuitive assumption, they help identify use cases and opportunities for further research on social VR.

We present the concept, design, and evaluation of a playful mobile virtual reality (VR) app for children to reduce anxiety and stress during MRI examinations. The Pengunaut Trainer aims to help children to familiarize themselves with the medical environment so that they can be examined without fear, rendering sedation unnecessary. The young patients learn about the procedure and train to lie still during a virtual MRI scan. We conducted a clinical trial focusing on an in-depth analysis of the game design. 29 children trained over 14 days on average before their MRI examination. The participants were impressed by the VR experience and motivated to train. They reported high levels of immersion and positive affect. Anxiety and negative feelings towards the upcoming MRI examination were significantly reduced after the training period. Moreover, our results indicate that the Pengunaut Trainer could be effective in reducing anxiety and stress during the MRI scan. Our results and the positive feedback from parents and medical professionals prove the validity of our approach.