Modeling the Induction of Psychosocial Stress in Virtual Reality Simulations

During the last few years, a wide number of virtual reality applications dealing with psychosocial stress have emerged. However, our current understanding of stress and psychosocial stress in virtual reality hinders our ability to finely control stress induction. In my PhD project I plan to develop a computational model which will describe the respective impact of each factor inducing psychosocial stress, including virtual reality factors, personal factors and other situational factors.

I. Motivation and Research Questions

The human-computer interaction field is gaining increasing interest and much effort is invested to optimize interfaces and build more human-centred applications. For instance, O. Carsten and M. H. Martens [1] state that the design and function of the Human Machine Interfaces is crucial for ensuring human safety, this is particularly true in car design. Affective computing, in the other hand, is a special sub-field where the emphasis is put on the detection, understanding and generation of human affect, and where the aim is to develop technologies fulfilling human needs, such as applications providing mental health services in virtual reality [2].