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.

This study explores how VR controller interfaces affect how participants hold a virtual push broom in VR. We aim to understand how the affordances available with current VR controllers and a custom broom VR controller impact user hand placement in a visual VR broom task. We compare hand placement in two VR conditions against hand placement holding a real push broom. Our goal is to understand the roles that controllers have on recreating physically accurate actions in VR training scenarios. The results from this initial pilot show an effect of the broom controller condition but also that the order in which some of the conditions were presented to subjects affected the way subjects held the VR and real push brooms in subsequent actions. Future work will continue to explore how controller affordance may impact the role of training in VR.