Virtual reality system as an affective medium to induce specific emotion: A validation study

Negative emotions can lead to emotional stress, and people in a negative state for a long time would easily have physiological and psychological diseases. Virtual reality technology could generate a lifelike high immersion simulated environment may relieve the emotional stress. The main purpose of this paper was to verify effectiveness of the virtual reality system to induce an emotional change. A multi-channel VR system was built to create the fear scene and elicit subjects' fear sense. Four different type of fear scenes: the Imagine fear scene, the Unknown fear scene, the Threatened fear scene and the Height fear scene were tested in experiment and subject's emotion change would be recorded by ways of subjective and physiological parameters, such as the subject's subjective feelings, heart rates and behavior performance etc. 15 subjects participated in experiment. The experiment result showed that VR system can induce subject's emotion change and the Threatended scene more easily induces responsive change in four different fearful scenes. In addition, the correlations between the visual, tactile and auditory stimuli of a VR system and emotion induced was also analyzed and the result showed that the correlation of visual stimulation was stronger than tactile and auditory.