Virtual reality (VR) offers great promise to expand delivery models for therapeutic interventions to help adolescents develop adaptive emotion regulation skills. Cognitive reappraisal (CR) is an emotion regulation skill that involves changing your thinking to improve your emotional state. However, adolescents face developmental and implementation barriers to do CR successfully. To better understand adolescents’ (15-18 years) lived experience of CR challenges and how they envision VR could support their skills learning and transfer to everyday life, we ran three co-design workshops (N=69). Our research weaves together the workshop findings with prior literature to identify directions for future VR-based CR interventions. From our study results, we generated design strategies leveraging best practices of existing research: embedded and embodied scaffolds, providing different points of view, and externalizing the inner self. To illustrate these strategies in practice, we show how each would work in a challenging emotional scenario identified by adolescents.

Physical walking is often considered the gold standard for VR travel whenever feasible. However, limited free-space walking areas in the real-world do not allow exploring larger-scale virtual environments by actual walking. Therefore, users often require handheld controllers for navigation, which can reduce believability, interfere with simultaneous interaction tasks, and exacerbate adverse effects such as motion sickness and disorientation. To investigate alternative locomotion options, we compared handheld Controller (thumbstick-based) and physical walking versus a seated (HeadJoystick) and standing/stepping (NaviBoard) leaning-based locomotion interface, where seated/standing users travel by moving their head toward the target direction. Rotations were always physically performed. To compare these interfaces, we designed a novel simultaneous locomotion and object interaction task, where users needed to keep touching the center of upward moving target balloons with their virtual lightsaber, while simultaneously staying inside a horizontally moving enclosure. Walking resulted in the best locomotion, interaction, and combined performances while the controller performed worst. Leaning-based interfaces improved user experience and performance compared to Controller, especially when standing/stepping using NaviBoard, but did not reach walking performance. That is, leaning-based interfaces HeadJoystick (sitting) and NaviBoard (standing) that provided additional physical self-motion cues compared to controller improved enjoyment, preference, spatial presence, vection intensity, motion sickness, as well as performance for locomotion, object interaction, and combined locomotion and object interaction. Our results also showed that less embodied interfaces (and in particular the controller) caused a more pronounced performance deterioration when increasing locomotion speed. Moreover, observed differences between our interfaces were not affected by repeated interface usage.

Access to nature and feeling connection is critical for mental health and well-being. These benefits may be mediated by self-transcendent emotions evoked by nature. We need to explore the capacity of technology to offer such experiences when we lack access to the restorative power of nature. Despite growing research validating this capacity, there is a lack of articulated design knowledge of how such experiences can be created. Here, we explore a technologically-mediated support for mental well-being through an agile design approach informed by self-transcendent emotion theory and transformative experience design. We developed Awedyssey as a sensory deprivation countermeasure experience in virtual reality (VR) and as a part of a public exhibition. We gathered qualitative feedback through interviews, diaries, and surveys. From this data we identified design tensions for designing complex emotional experiences when considering the diversity of individuals and dual effects of designing for realism, autonomy, vastness, and comfort.

Continuous locomotion in VR provides uninterrupted optical flow, which mimics real-world locomotion and supports path integration . However, optical flow limits the maximum speed and acceleration that can be effectively used without inducing cybersickness. In contrast, teleportation provides neither optical flow nor acceleration cues, and users can jump to any length without increasing cybersickness. However, teleportation cannot support continuous spatial updating and can increase disorientation. Thus, we designed 'HyperJump' in an attempt to merge benefits from continuous locomotion and teleportation. HyperJump adds iterative jumps every half a second on top of the continuous movement and was hypothesized to facilitate faster travel without compromising spatial awareness/orientation. In a user study, Participants travelled around a naturalistic virtual city with and without HyperJump (equivalent maximum speed). They followed waypoints to new landmarks, stopped near them and pointed back to all previously visited landmarks in random order. HyperJump was added to two continuous locomotion interfaces (controller- and leaning-based). Participants had better spatial awareness/orientation with leaning-based interfaces compared to controller-based (assessed via rapid pointing). With HyperJump, participants travelled significantly faster, while staying on the desired course without impairing their spatial knowledge. This provides evidence that optical flow can be effectively limited such that it facilitates faster travel without compromising spatial orientation. In future design iterations, we plan to utilize audio-visual effects to support jumping metaphors that help users better anticipate and interpret jumps, and use much larger virtual environments requiring faster speeds, where cybersickness will become increasingly prevalent and thus teleporting will become more important.

Using standard handheld interfaces for VR locomotion may not provide a believable self-motion experience and can contribute to unwanted side effects such as motion sickness, disorientation, or increased cognitive load. This paper demonstrates how using a seated leaning-based locomotion interface -HeadJoystick- in VR ground-based navigation affects user experience, usability, and performance. In three within-subject studies, we compared controller (touchpad/thumbstick) with a more embodied interface ("HeadJoystick") where users moved their head and/or leaned in the direction of desired locomotion. In both conditions, users sat on a regular office chair and used it to control virtual rotations. In the first study, 24 participants used HeadJoystick versus Controller in three complementary tasks including reach-the-target, follow-the-path, and racing (dynamic obstacle avoidance). In the second study, 18 participants repeatedly used HeadJoystick versus Controller (8 one-minute trials each) in a reach-the-target task. To evaluate potential benefits of different brake mechanisms, in the third study 18 participants were asked to stop within each target area for one second. All three studies consistently showed advantages of HeadJoystick over Controller: we observed improved performance in all tasks, as well as higher user ratings for enjoyment, spatial presence, immersion, vection intensity, usability, ease of learning, ease of use, and rated potential for daily and long-term use, while reducing motion sickness and task load. Overall, our results suggest that leaning-based interfaces such as HeadJoystick provide an interesting and more embodied alternative to handheld interfaces in driving, reach-the-target, and follow-the-path tasks, and potentially a wider range of scenarios.

Flying in virtual reality (VR) using standard handheld controllers can be cumbersome and contribute to unwanted side effects such as motion sickness and disorientation. This article investigates a novel hands-free flying interface-HeadJoystick, where the user moves their head similar to a joystick handle toward the target direction to control virtual translation velocity. The user sits on a regular office swivel chair and rotates it physically to control virtual rotation using 1:1 mapping. We evaluated short-term (Study 1) and extended usage effects through repeated usage (Study 2) of the HeadJoystick versus handheld interfaces in two within-subject studies, where participants flew through a sequence of increasingly difficult tunnels in the sky. Using the HeadJoystick instead of handheld interfaces improved both user experience and performance, in terms of accuracy, precision, ease of learning, ease of use, usability, long-term use, presence, immersion, sensation of self-motion, workload, and enjoyment in both studies. These findings demonstrate the benefits of using leaning-based interfaces for VR flying and potentially similar telepresence applications such as remote flight with quadcopter drones. From a theoretical perspective, we also show how leaning-based motion cueing interacts with full physical rotation to improve user experience and performance compared to the gamepad.

Telepresence robots allow people to participate in remote spaces, yet they can be difficult to manoeuvre with people and obstacles around. We designed a haptic-feedback system called "FeetBack," which users place their feet in when driving a telepresence robot. When the robot approaches people or obstacles, haptic proximity and collision feedback are provided on the respective sides of the feet, helping inform users about events that are hard to notice through the robot's camera views. We conducted two studies: one to explore the usage of FeetBack in virtual environments, another focused on real environments. We found that FeetBack can increase spatial presence in simple virtual environments. Users valued the feedback to adjust their behaviour in both types of environments, though it was sometimes too frequent or unneeded for certain situations after a period of time. These results point to the value of foot-based haptic feedback for telepresence robot systems, while also the need to design context-sensitive haptic feedback.