We are inves­ti­gat­ing and cre­at­ing a new vir­tual real­ity (VR) expe­ri­ence, ‘Awedyssey’, for the pro­mo­tion and enhance­ment of well-being. Today, dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy per­va­sively inter­sects with our daily lives, and VR stands out as a dig­i­tal tool capa­ble of fos­ter­ing pos­i­tive emo­tion like awe, self-transcendence, and authen­tic social connection.

Connecting with nature is very impor­tant for our mental health and well-being. Self-transcendent emo­tions evoked by nature can con­tribute to restora­tive health ben­e­fits, but pow­er­ful nat­ural phe­nom­e­non can be dif­fi­cult to access for many people. Although research shows tech­nol­ogy can help, we don’t know much about how to design these expe­ri­ences. We attempted to inform this ques­tion through devel­op­ment of ‘Awedyssey’, a VR technologically-mediated tool for well-being.

We used self-transcendent emo­tion theory and trans­for­ma­tive expe­ri­ence design to ground the design process and deci­sions. ‘Awedyssey’ has been deployed in two unique con­texts: ini­tially devel­oped as VR sen­sory depri­va­tion coun­ter­mea­sure expe­ri­ence, and as a part of sev­eral inter­ac­tive public exhi­bi­tions. Insights from these con­texts inform the nature of design­ing com­plex emo­tional expe­ri­ences, specif­i­cally in con­sid­er­a­tion of diver­sity of indi­vid­u­als, and plu­ral­ity of design­ing for real­ism, auton­omy, vast­ness, and comfort.

Awedyssey was designed with the following goals:

• Supporting well-being, pro­mot­ing relaxation
• Evoking a feel­ing of connection
  • – to self
  • – to humanity
  • – to nature
  • – to earth
• Countering feel­ings of isolation
• Facilitating feel­ings of awe and wonder
• Visual and emo­tion­ally stim­u­lat­ing experience
• Meaningful intro­spec­tion, med­i­ta­tion, refection.

Readers can learn more about the design of Awedyssey, its eval­u­a­tion, and rec­om­men­da­tions for research design prac­tice in our 2023 ACM DIS pub­li­ca­tion.

Publications and exhibits

Related Projects

Pathways to Flourishing

SIRIUS — Virtual Earthgazing to mit­i­gate effects of sen­sory isolation

Virtual Earthgazing — towards an overview effect in Virtual Reality

Support & Acknowledgement

The project is sup­ported through SSHRC Small insti­tu­tional grant; Prior ver­sions of ‘Awedyssey’ were devel­oped and stud­ied through the DLR grant 50WB1915 and ESA project AO-SIRIUS-2019 (PI: Dr. AC Stahn, Charité Berlin, see SIRIUS for details) and addi­tional sup­port via SSHRC and NSERC.