Are You Awed Yet? How Virtual Reality Gives Us Awe and Goose Bumps

Abstract

“Awe” is a category of emotion within the spectrum of self-transcendent experiences. Awe has wellness benefits, with feelings of social interconnectivity and increased life satisfaction. However, awe experiences remain rare in our everyday lives, and rarer in lab environments. We posit that Virtual Reality (VR) may help to make self-transcendent and potentially transformative experiences of awe more accessible to individuals. Here, we investigated how interactive VR as a positive technology may elicit awe, and how features of aesthetic beauty/scale, familiarity, and personalization (self-selection of travel destinations) may induce awe. In this mixed-methods study, participants used an interactive VR system to explore Earth from ground and orbit. We collected: introspective interviews and self-report questionnaires with participants’ experience of awe; information on personality traits and gender; and we recorded physiological goose bumps on the skin (using an arm-mounted goose bump camera instrument), which is a documented marker of an awe experience. Results showed that on a scale of 0–100 for self-reported awe, four different interactive VR environments yielded an average awe rating of 79.7, indicating that interactive VR can indeed induce awe. 43.8% of participants experienced goose bumps: awe ratings positively correlated with the occurrence of goose bumps with those who experienced goose bumps having showed significantly higher ratings of awe than those who did not. Most (64%) of the goose bumps occurred when participants self-selected their VR environment. Participant statements from the interviews were characteristic of an awe-inspiring experience, revealed themes of social connection, and usability problems with the VR interface. Personality traits yielded no clear correlation to awe ratings, and females appear to experience more goose bumps than males. In summary: (1) Interactive VR can elicit awe, especially within familiar, self-selected environments; (2) Physiological goose bumps can be recorded to provide reliable, non-intrusive indications of awe; (3) Care must be taken to design interaction interfaces that do not impede awe; and (4) While personality traits are not correlated to awe ratings, goose bumps were experienced more frequently among females. We aim to conduct future studies using custom VR environments, interfaces, and additional physiological measures to provide further insight into awe.

Space—A Virtual Frontier: How to Design and Evaluate a Virtual Reality Experience of the Overview Effect

“…Awe is one of the key components of the OE and thus can be considered a necessary, but not sufficient condition for the OE to manifest. Awe has been researched more than the OE, and might be easier to measure through psychometrics (Yaden et al, 2018) and physiological measures (Quesnel and Riecke, 2018) than the other components of the OE-interconnectedness and responsibility for Earth. Therefore, focusing on eliciting awe first would be an important first step in the iterative development of an OE experience in VR.…”

“…This connection should not only be established with a location on the globe when Earthgazing, but even earlier, at the initial part of the experience, inviting the immersant to a virtual environment representing a familiar setting, that the immersant can easily associate with and feel at home. In our previous studies, we found that the majority of confirmed awe-inspiring moments occurred when immersants had self-relevance, such as when selecting to visit a familiar location that held personal meaning (Quesnel and Riecke, 2018). It is possible that this effect carries into the experience of the OE.…”

“…We have also evaluated the potential of Google Earth VR to elicit awe (Quesnel and Riecke, 2018). Google Earth provides a high resolution model of Earth, that is likely more capable of giving the sense of vastness to the immersants than the models used in the studies discussed above.…”

“…This technological breakthrough is providing us with an opportunity to make the OE more accessible to researchers and the general public. While VR probably won't be able to provide an experience as powerful as the OE experienced by space-travelers, recent research shows that it has the potential of eliciting at least some aspects of the OE Quesnel and Riecke, 2018;Stepanova et al, in press), supporting its potential to inviting at least a smaller degree of the OE in participants on Earth. However, the extent to which VR technology would be able to elicit a transformative experience such as the OE remains an open research question.…”

Awe and the interconnected self

“…Awe is recognized as a positive emotion due to its diverse benefits across various domains of life. Physiologically, awe is associated with parasympathetic activation -a division in the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) that is responsible for energy conservation and decreased heart rate -and sympathetic withdrawal (e.g., Chirico et al, 2017;Shiota et al, 2014Shiota et al, , 2011Quesnel & Riecke, 2018;Rankin et al, 2019). The regulatory function of awe for the autonomic nervous system may restore balance and moderate the effects of stress.…”