Eliciting Emotions in VR

Description

Emotion is a psyscho-physiological process triggered by conscious/unconscious perception of objects or situations. Emotions play an important role in human communication. Emotion assessment is often carried out through analysis of users’ emotional expressions and/or physiological signals and eliciting emotion can be purposeful for various research work. The advent of Virtual Reality devices provides an opportunity to explore part of the research in VR which have been conducted in the lab until now.

The objective of this thesis is to obtain a thorough understanding of how suitable Virtual Reality is for conducting psychological research. The student is required to review previous work that investigates the use of VR as a research tool continuing to investigate one use case in more detail. The thesis requires the design and implementation of a user study to compare if VR is as effective as the Real World to measure emotional experience on the valence-arousal scale.

Tasks

• Comprehensive survey of related work
• Review of relevant research questions in the application area
• Running a comparative user study (both in Real and Virtual World)
• Analysis, reflection and discussion of the outcomes

Requirements

• Independent scientific work and creative problem solving
• Interest in performing user studies and experiments
• Interest in VR
• Nice to have experience with 3D modelling and programming with Unity