CRII: HCC: Validating the Design of an Immersive Virtual Reality Therapeutic System to Support Connectedness and Meaning-Centered Bereavement Experience

About This Grant

Bereaved parents who have lost a child to cancer often report a feeling of isolation and a loss of social connectedness after leaving the treatment hospitals. Many of them also struggle to make sense of and find meaning in their traumatic experience of loss due to the untimely death of a young child. Challenges with finding meaning have been associated with prolonged and complicated grief symptoms that can adversely affect grieving parents’ quality of life. Although existing videoconferencing and social media tools can be used to provide bereavement support remotely, their user experiences are generally not engaging because of the fourth wall effect (an imaginary barrier that separates an audience from the fictional/virtual world), and they lack custom features to support meaning-centered grief therapies. Leveraging the unique affordances of multi-user immersive virtual reality (IVR) system and text-to-image generative artificial intelligence (AI), this project develops an immersive and individualized therapeutic experience that supports meaning-centered grief techniques and activities for bereaved parents in shared virtual worlds and fosters their social connectedness. Findings from project user studies will shed light on how different aspects of IVR system design will affect deep and sensitive emotion processing in bereaved parents when they are participating in mean-centered grief therapies in virtual environments (VEs). Most existing IVR therapies for mental health are based on Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and exposure therapy and the content of these therapies is geared more toward behavioral change and modification or symptom management rather than the emotional processing of loss that is central to the grief therapies. To tailor to the special emotional and psychological needs in bereavement support, the project innovates with three design focuses to facilitate emotional connection and regulation in the bereaved individuals. First, the creation of an easy-to-setup robust avatar system with support of facial and body motion captures to show a user’s emotions during the grief therapies. Second, the integration of text-to-image generative AI models into the IVR to create a more individualized therapeutic experience for guided imagery mindfulness therapy by allowing the user to custom generate a skybox of surrounding environments in VE that are related to their grief experience and emotional status. Third, custom designed 3D user interfaces (3D UIs) that fully support meaning-centered grief techniques chosen to be conducted in IVR (e.g. group grief story sharing, guided imagery mindfulness, the wind phone, etc.). Ultimately, the project aims to answer the following research questions: (1) How does the immersive nature of an IVR experience affect a user's grieving experience in terms of connectedness, expression of emotions, and healing from loss? (2) Will the integration of a text-to-image generative AI model in IVR contribute to a positive therapeutic experience through customized visualization of a user’s emotions and mental status? (3) How can interactivity and 3D user interface (3D UI) designs support meaning-centered grief activities in IVR? This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.