Investigating Autobiographic Recall in VR

Description

Virtual Reality is increasingly being used as a research tool. It is particularly useful in situations, where users should not be put at risk, for example, when testing a novel automotive user interface.

At the same time affective user interfaces, i.e. interfaces that are either emotion-aware or aim to influence users' emotions are become increasingly popular. Similarly to VR, this line of research is particularly relevant in the context of automotive user interfaces, because it has the potential to lead to safer driving.

As of today it remains unclear, how well state-of-the-art emotion elicitation methods work in VR, which is at the focus of this thesis. The thesis specifically focuses on one elicitation technique, called autobiographic reflection. The idea is that participants recall a situation that evoked a particular emotion. This techniques is promising in automotive research, since it does not rely on any visual or auditory cues.

The objective of this thesis is to obtain an understanding of Autobiographical Recall technique in detail and how well it works in Virtual Reality. We aim to explore the various recall approaches work, including but not limited to talking to an avatar vs. no avatar, telling the story aloud vs. writing it down, recalling the situation while a research is present / while no researcher is present. Ultimately, design considerations for specific use cases should be derived.

Tasks

• Comprehensive survey of related work
• Design and development of a prototype
• Evaluation of the prototype and comparison to previous work

Requirements

• Independent scientific work and creative problem solving
• Interest in performing user studies and experiments
• Interest in VR
• Willingness to learn Unity