When you were old: Exploring a Virtual Reality Older Adults Experience Simulation System

The mental health of older adults is a vital issue in the era of global aging. Empathy towards older adults constitutes a crucial component of social interaction, as it engenders awareness of the physical and mental obstacles encountered by this population. Empathy promotes individuals to be more friendly, considerate, and prosocial when interacting with older adults on various occasions, such as volunteering and professional caring. Various approaches have been used to promote people's empathy, but disadvantages like low participation enthusiasm, high cost, and time-consuming cannot be ignored and are not easy to deal with. Aimed at facilitating people's empathy towards older adults, we developed EmpathiaVR, a virtual reality older adults experience simulation system. It provides a multi-sensory mixed reality experience, including vision, hearing, and kinesthesis, from an older person's perspective, which is beneficial for provoking users' empathy towards older adults. To investigate the effectiveness of the system, an empirical study was conducted with 24 participants. The experiment employed a between-subjects design with two groups. The experiment results from both the subjective reports and behavioral variables indicated that the system enhanced people's empathy.