VR Acute Threat Experience
Using VR to Study Common Phobias
We once again partnered with Virginia Commonwealth University to design and build a VR experience, this time to help study common phobias and people’s reaction when exposed to them. The experience was designed to provoke common phobias and measure the participant’s fear reactivity. The study has been conducted before, but this time we were looking to set a standardized method of testing.
Previously, they used a variety of different platforms to induce different phobias. For example, having the participant watch a YouTube video of a 360-degree surgery. Although there are a couple of games and experiences to measure phobias, there is no universal format, which in turn led to skewed results. Utilizing the power of VR, we were able to place 5 different phobias in one experience!
Key Design Problem
One issue we ran into was balancing design with enough authenticity to invoke a fear response. We asked ourselves, “How can we make this feel real enough to induce fear without using hyper realistic assets?”
We had to get creative and punch in the perfect combination of visual queues, coupled with sound effects to make it all work. By establishing a convincing ambience, we were able to simulate common phobias without relying on hyper-realistic details.
Experience and Scenarios
The experience contains 5 immersive scenarios that each tackle different types of phobias and 1 neutral experience used to gather the participant’s baseline. The scenarios are as followers:
Fear of harmless insects and animals:
The scenario involves checking on a friend’s pet. The participant is placed in a sketchy environment containing the following:
Roaches
Tarantula
Bird
Mice
Dogs
Claustrophobia:
The user is placed in an old, small elevator with a hole in the floor. As people continue to enter the elevator, it shakes and makes noises. Then – the elevator suddenly stops and the lights go out!
Fear of aggression:
The participant encounters an angry man at a coffee shop. The man is furious because the shop has given him the wrong order. He suddenly starts a confrontation with the user.
Social fear:
The participant must read a speech in front of judges and answer math questions under a time limit.
Fear of injury:
The participant wakes up in a dirty triage room, next to bloody bandages and scalpels. To top it off, their doctor is young, inexperienced, and unprofessional.
Neutral:
The participant is placed in an empty room with an aquarium. This scenario is used to establish the user’s baseline.
We took the experience one step further. To facilitate the study, we created an in-app rating system that allowed users to rate their experience after each scenario played out. This in turn allows the researchers to save time in the data collecting phase of the study.
