Being limited in a small and white little room, it is hard for patients in hospitals with physical disabilities to uphold their mental health, as well as their will to be cured. Some of these people are even found discouraged during their physical therapies. However, hospitals are responsible to take care of them before their recoveries, meaning that the hospitals’ workloads are directly related to these patients’ positivenesses. Therefore, encouraging them not to give up becomes a crucial mission to be completed.
There are, of course, social workers that are visiting these patients day by day to ensure they are mentally healthy and capable. Nevertheless, they can only provide help by verbal encouragements, and more effective ways needs to be found.
As technology develops, scholars notice the potential of VR, which can provide realistic and immersive experiences to emotionally approach the user. In South Korea, VR application was recently used to comfort a mother by creating a virtual experience for her to reunite with her dead daughter, which was found successful when the mother has a positive response after that.
This example inspires me with VR’s potential of its ability to change a person’s perspective as well as their mental state.
Another example comes from “The Room” VR experience, created by the ANA, which introduces the 777-300ER cabins and premiered their upgraded business class seat. The VR experiment has amazed their audiences, as they have a higher willingness to purchase the business class seat to truly experience it once. This application demonstrates the potential of evoking interest of audiences by VR experiencing them, and consequently a higher willingness to pay effort for the experience.
Therefore, in this project, I aim to create an experience for patients with curable disabilities, especially those who have been staying in the hospital for a long period, to remind them of the happiness of being able to travel, and revisit their home-sweet-home, in which motivates them to be more active in receiving therapies, which leads to a faster recovery.
The Building of “LEAVE”
In my project, I recreated a journey that a user can explore and travel to different places. The user will find themselves lying on a hospital bed at the beginning in order for them to relate themselves with the virtual world, and therefore provide a more realistic experience. It is named “LEAVE” to demonstrate the core concept of the application which encourages the patients to leave. The welcome message plays with the rhetoric too – “You are welcome to LEAVE” – that you are welcome to the application, that welcomes you to leave the hospital.
After 3 seconds, the virtual character will sit up, and the camera will rotate from an upward view to a horizontal view. This animation creates motion sickness for the user (the movements seen by the eyes do not match the movements sensed by the vestibular system), that the user may want to sit up to counter-act the sickness. By then, the first encouragement of movement is done.
buttons are shown in front of the user to allow them to travel to the scene of their choice. When the user points to the button, a little figure will appear to visualize, or a sense of preview, of their choice.
The first scene “forest” consists of a 360 video with sound. I choose the “forest” to be one of the scenes because I believe nature provides a feeling of hope and energy. Of course, this concept is subjective and may not be the same, so what works for me may not work for others. Regardless, this project is a prototype, and choices of scenes are always customizable.
For the user to return to the previous scene, simply click the button below to return to the hospital.
According to a survey made by myself, 6 out of 10 respondents indicate home to be the first place to visit after their hospital discharge. Therefore, the second scene I chose to include is the “home” scene. In the scene, the user will find themselves in the middle of a house. They will be able to move around and explore the environment by interacting with the buttons in front of them.
At last, the user will reach the bed, and lay down on the bed by clicking the laydown button. The dummy body will appear on the bed, indicating the end of the journey.
Applications & Future Directions
This VR application examines the effectiveness of using technology to motivate and encourage individuals by providing immersive VR experiments. This project can be further developed and customized for real patients in hospitals, and test if this approach implants positive effects on their mental status and assist their recovery.
Interestingly enough, there are assumptive theories that the VR experience can demotivate the user due to the comparison it creates between the virtual world and reality (like video games). This application can also be used as an experiment to test this theory, after careful consideration of research ethics.