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Transformative Experiences Become More Accessible Through Virtual
Reality
Ekaterina R. Stepanova*Denise Quesnel†Bernhard Riecke‡
Simon Fraser University
ABSTRACT
Virtual Reality (VR) has immersive powers that can teleport an im-
mersant into a virtual world and provide them with an experience of
being somewhere that they may not have been able to go to. These
powers of VR are most often used for games and entertainment,
creating a space for escapism and isolation that may have negative
psychological and societal outcomes. In this paper, we argue for an
opposing application of VR technology - for promoting wellness
and feeling of connectedness with people and the world around us.
Such feelings can be elicited as a result of a profound awe-inspiring
experience, that expands one’s mental model and consequently leads
to a positive behavioral change. Such experiences are described as
transformative, or in strong cases ’pivotal’. Unfortunately, these
experiences are rare, only accessible by some people, and nearly
unavailable for researchers interested in studying this phenomenon.
The immersive powers of VR present a unique opportunity to re-
produce such experiences in the lab or at home, thus making them
accessible both to the public and to the researchers. Having real-time
access to an experience of the immersant will allow the researchers
to study the progression of the tranformative experiences and under-
stand its effects and precursors. In this paper, we are proposing a
framework through which transformative experiences can be studied
in VR. Understanding this phenomenon will inform how VR experi-
ences should be designed in order to create a positive impact on our
society.
Index Terms:
Human-centered computing—Human Com-
puter Interaction—Interaction Paradigms—Virtual Reality; Applied
Computing—Life and Medical Sciences—Consumer Health Ap-
plied Computing—Education—Interactive Learning Environments
1 INTRODUCTION
A few fortunate individuals have an opportunity to have a profound
experience in their lives that evolve them as a changed person.
Such experiences are often described as transformative or, in strong
cases, ’pivotal’ or, when interpreted through spirituality, transcen-
dent. While these experiences have a positive psychological effect,
they tend to be very rare, and difficult to study [16]. These ex-
periences most often occur when an individual observes the vast
beauty of nature, for example when one climbs a mountain [25],
reaches Antarctica [17] or looks at Earth from space [26]. As such,
for most cases these experience are only accessible to the privi-
leged group of people, who have the physical and financial means
to travel to the places where a transformative experience can oc-
cur. We posit that Virtual Reality (VR) technology can increase the
accessibility of such experiences for both researchers interested in
understanding them and the larger population interested in experi-
encing them [7, 20, 21]
*e-mail: erstepan@sfu.ca
†e-mail:dquesnel@sfu.ca
‡e-mail:ber1@sfu.ca
2 CURRENT CHALLENGES
Currently transformative experiences are very difficult to study be-
cause they are rare, private and complex. As such, for the researchers
interested in better understanding and researching these experiences,
it is fairly difficult to find individuals who have gone through a
transformative experience. Transformative experiences are very
private, thus, even if a researcher happens to be next to the per-
son who is having a transformative experience at that moment, any
intrusion from the researcher will prevent the experience from hap-
pening. Therefore the only information available for the researchers
is retrospective, with a long delay between the experience and the
interview or survey, which makes this measure prone to recall and
interpretation errors [12].
An individual experience of a person having a transformative
experience will be different from an experience of another individ-
ual [25]. Not only will the individual variables have an effect on
each personal experience, but the environment in which these expe-
riences occur also differ, thus making it even more difficult to make
generalizations from the collected interviews.
Figure 1: Tranformative Framework
3 TH E FRAM EWOR K
We are proposing a framework (see Fig. 1) that discusses transfor-
mative experiences as transitions between three stages: perceptual
experience, cognitive shift and behavioral change. We are proposing
how VR can be used in order to create a controlled environment to
apply this framework to study transformative experiences.
3.1 Perceptual Experience (Stage 1)
We posit that a transformative experience starts from a novel per-
ceptual experience that is able to elicit an emotional response. In
many cases, this experience has the property of perceptual vastness
which elicits emotions such as awe [14, 15]. VR technology can be
used to create vast stimuli, and in combination with an affordance
of inducing the sense of ”presence” it has the potential to elicit awe-
inspiring experiences [5]. As the environment is created in the VR
it will remain more or less constant between each participant of the
study, thus having this environmental variable controlled.
This stage can be studied in detail through physiological mea-
sures. Biosensors such as heart rate variability, galvanic response,
and goosebumps [2, 11, 19] can help identify specific moments in
the experience that resulted in an emotional response in the par-
ticipant. Another evaluation method that should be paired with
physiological measures is cued-recall debrief [3], where the partici-
pant re-immerses inside their experience while watching a recording
of it. This measure is less prone to memory errors than interviews,
and will allow the researcher to disambiguate events observed in
the recordings of the physiological measures. Correlating all of
these measures with the recording of participant’s view will give
the researchers access to the specific moment of change for the par-
ticipant, and the relation to the components of the virtual system.
This would provide the valuable information about the effectiveness
of the specific elements of the design of the virtual environment in
ability to trigger affective response.
3.2 Transformative Design Framework (Transition 1)
Andrea Gaggioli [7] proposed a framework that explains how the
transition from the perceptual experience to the cognitive shift hap-
pens. When presented with a powerful and novel perceptual experi-
ence, an individual has three options of dealing with it: assimilation,
accommodation or rejection. If an individual is able to fit the ex-
perience into their current worldview, then the experience will get
assimilated and no further change will occur. However, if the ex-
perience does not fit with the worldview, thus there is a perceptual
dissonance, then the worldview ought to change to accommodate for
the new perspective, which would lead to a cognitive shift. However,
if the individual is not able to accommodate the new perspective
it will get rejected, by finding an alternative explanation for the
experience, e.g. an illusion or a hallucination. While in the real
world, this third option of rejection is less likely to occur; in the case
of a VR experience, it is easy to disregard it as not real. Thus it is
important for the researchers to pay attention to how they prepare
the participant to the experience by carefully building trust in the
system.
3.3 Cognitive shift (Stage 2)
After a successful accommodation, an individual will experience a
cognitive shift in their worldview, or an expansion of their mental
model. This stage is the most challenging to assess, as it requires the
use of implicit measures that can tap into the structure of the cogni-
tive system of the participant. Such measures can use physiological
measures such as eye-tracking, or tests that rely on reaction time or
disambiguation [28].
An example of such implicit measure is an Implicit Association
Test (IAT) [10], that can, e.g., be used for assessing one’s connect-
edness to nature [4, 23], which is one of the observed outcomes of
transformative experiences [27]. This is a computerized test that
uses reaction time to assess how closely one associates ”self” with
”nature”. A disambiguation test can use ambiguous images or stories
to infer participant’s attitudes from his interpretation of the stimuli.
Tests that rely on reaction time have more noise than disambigua-
tion tests, but they provide a continuous measure and they are more
resilient to social desirability bias.
3.4 Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Transition 2)
Similarly to the transformative design framework, cognitive dis-
sonance theory [6] explains the transition from the cognitive to
behavioral change through emergence of a disequilibrium and the
desire of the cognitive system to return to equilibrium. Thus if the
new worldview is inconsistent with current behavior of the partici-
pant, then to resolve the conflict either the worldview or the behavior
will need to change. Since the worldview has just been adjusted in
order to accommodate for the perceptual experience, at this stage
adjusting the worldview will create a new conflict, so the only way
to achieve the equilibrium would be to modify one’s behavior to
reflect new values of the expanded mental model.
3.5 Behavioral Change (Stage 3)
The ultimate goal of understanding how to design the transformative
experiences is to create a caring society where an individual will
find it unnatural to behave in a way that is destructive or ignorant.
This stage can be evaluated through behavioral measures such as
observing participants’ pro-social [22] or pro-environmental [1] be-
haviors. These observations are performed with deception by staging
a situation to which a participant has to react, e.g. experimenter can
drop pens [22] or spill water [1], and then participants behavior is
observed. This measure can also use reaction times.
However, it is important to consider the timeline at which this
change occurs. While taking this measure right after the VR expe-
rience is convenient, it will be prompt to two possible issues: 1)
it may not capture the change that requires longer processing time
before the cognitive system achieves equilibrium, thus producing a
false negative result in the measure; or on the other hand, 2) it may
also produce a false positive result, by failing to assess longitudinal
effects of the experience.
4 A CASE O F THE OVERVIEW EFFEC T
For the specific example of how this framework can be applied, we
want to discuss the Overview Effect. The Overview Effect is the pro-
found experience that astronauts have when they see the Earth from
space, and realize how beautiful and fragile the planet is, and how
we all as living species need to unite together to protect our home
planet [26]. This is a strong, profound experience with long-lasting
positive psychological effects [13,24]. A lot of astronauts after re-
turning to Earth start engaging in pro-social and pro-environmental
activities [9]. However, as space flight is inaccessible to the majority
of the world population, this presents a perfect case for VR technol-
ogy to step in and deliver an experience to the general public that
could induce the Overview effect (or an extent of it) without shooting
rockets into space. In order to evaluate whether the VR experience
was able to achieve an extent of the Overview Effect, the researchers
can look for the emotion of awe and wonder felt [8,19], the cogni-
tive shift leading to increased connectedness with nature [4,23], and
observe pro-social [22] and pro-environmental [1] behaviors.
We are iteratively working on a prototype of a VR experience
inspired by the Overview Effect; the user tests are indicating that the
VR experience is effective in eliciting desired emotional responses
and has potential for inducing a cognitive shift [18]. However, the
description of our prototype and the results of the tests are out of the
scope of this position paper.
5 CONCLUSION
VR can provide a unique opportunity for researchers to study a very
complex and personal phenomenon of transformative experiences
in a controlled lab environment, making these profound positive
experiences accessible for both the researchers and general public
willing to improve their well-being. Such transformative VR in-
stallations can be made available to the public in culture spaces,
such as museums and art galleries, thus not only providing access
to these positive experiences to general public, but also giving re-
searchers a potential access to a wide range of participants. In the
future, when VR technology becomes even more widespread and
the transformative experiences design is well understood, these VR
experiences can be made available for the public to use at the com-
fort of their own home for improvement of their well-being akin to
mobile meditation apps. However, the design of the experience and
the research of it are interdependent, and thus we will need to design
and evaluate the experience and the evaluation methods, proposed
for assessing the progression through stages of the transformative
experience, through an iterative process, at the end of which we will
build the knowledge of how to design VR experiences for well-being
and a positive change in society.
ACK NOWL EDG MEN TS
The authors wish to thank NSERC and NGX Interactive. This work
was supported in part by NSERC Engage grant.
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