Creating AWE: Artistic and Scientific Practices in Research-Based Design for Exploring a Profound Immersive Installation

Quesnel, Denise; Stepanova, Ekaterina R.; Aguilar, Ivan Abdo; Pennefather, Patrick Parra; Riecke, Bernhard E.

doi:10.1109/gem.2018.8516463

Cited by 15 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Introspective data revealed that interactivity and allowing participants to navigate themselves had benefits, such as free movement and a feeling of agency, but also detriments, such as difficulty using controllers. This motivated us to create hands-free, leaning-based interfaces in our own design of awe-inspiring virtual environments ( Quesnel et al, 2018 ). When looking at the participant’s demographic questionnaire details, several participants had experience with 3D games, but not VR systems.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Once hand controllers are used, focus may shift to completing tasks (flying, or searching) rather than simply “being there.” It is worth investigating how navigation interfaces with different modes of interaction impact awe and embodiment. Intuitive navigation interfaces like leaning and gestural motion tracking should be explored; our recent study using leaning-based interaction in a VR environment designed to elicit awe and wonder suggests that providing embodied navigation and eliminating hand controllers may reduce breaks in presence ( Quesnel et al, 2018 ). In future studies, avoidance of interactions that may prevent awe from occurring through a loss of presence or concentration could provide evidence of new typologies of virtually induced awe.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Quesnel

Riecke

2018

Front. Psychol.

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“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.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Quesnel

Riecke

2018

Front. Psychol.

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“…In order to facilitate progression to the desired state of OE, in our own implementation, we used an artistic approach to a VR experience inspired by the OE, and created a physical/virtual environment called AWE (Quesnel et al, 2018b) that has been demonstrated at multiple conferences and community events, as well as in a series of studies. For evaluation, we used cuedrecall, micro-phenomenological and open-ended interviews, as well as goose bumps measures, "small-self " and Implicit Association Test of implicit connection with nature.…”

Section: Existing Implementationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Finally, we discuss some of the existing VR applications inspired by spaceflight experiences, and make a tentative comparison between them and our guidelines. We applied some of the proposed design guidelines ourselves by iteratively designing a prototype of an immersive experience inspired by the OE (Quesnel et al, 2018b), which we evaluated in a study using some of the methods proposed in this paper (Stepanova et al, in press); however, comprehensive discussion of this prototype is outside of the scope of this paper and can be found in the above mentioned publications.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Stepanova

Quesnel

Riecke

2019

Front. Digit. Humanit.

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“…However, the interviewer needs to be highly trained in the interviewing technique to ensure reliability. Microphenomenology has been used to study awe (Quesnel et al, 2018 ; Stepanova et al, 2019 ), meditative experiences (Petitmengin et al, 2017 ; Prpa et al, 2018 ; Przyrembel and Singer, 2018 ), and altered states of consciousness caused by DMT—a fast-acting tryptamine psychedelic (Timmermann et al, 2019 ). Both phenomenology and microphenomenology can be useful in describing self-transcendence, but which one you use depends on if you want to study the experience generally and across life times (phenomenology), or if you want to look at one specific experience in great detail (microphenomenology).…”

Section: Results: Research/evaluation Methods For Investigating Sementioning

confidence: 99%

A Review on Research and Evaluation Methods for Investigating Self-Transcendence

et al. 2020

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Self-transcendence has been characterized as a decrease in self-saliency (ego disillusionment) and increased connection, and has been growing in research interest in the past decade. Several measures have been developed and published with some degree of psychometric validity and reliability. However, to date, there has been no review systematically describing, contrasting, and evaluating the different methodological approaches toward measuring self-transcendence including questionnaires, neurological and physiological measures, and qualitative methods. To address this gap, we conducted a review to describe existing methods of measuring self-transcendence, evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of these methods, and discuss research avenues to advance assessment of self-transcendence, including recommendations for suitability of methods given research contexts.

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Creating AWE: Artistic and Scientific Practices in Research-Based Design for Exploring a Profound Immersive Installation

Cited by 15 publications

References 25 publications

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

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

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

A Review on Research and Evaluation Methods for Investigating Self-Transcendence

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