Chittaro Luca
Human-Computer Interaction Lab, University of Udine, Italy.
Stud Health Technol Inform. 2012;181:172-6.
In this paper, we first propose a general technique to induce anxiety in virtual environments (VEs) which exploits auditory heartbeat perception and biofeedback. Then, we consider a VE that reproduces a real-world anxiety-inducing experience (being suddenly surrounded by smoke during a fire evacuation of a building), and we describe an experiment that contrasts 3 conditions: (i) an augmentation of the VE with a bar that indicates when the user's avatar gets hurt, (ii) an augmentation of the VE with the typical audio visual stimuli which are employed in violent videogames when the user's avatar gets hurt, (iii) introduction of the proposed biofeedback technique in the previous condition. We carry out an electrodermal analysis showing that the introduction of the proposed technique produces much higher physiological arousal in terms of skin conductance level (SCL) than the other two conditions. Subjective measures of users' state anxiety are consistent with the recorded physiological reactions.
在本文中，我们首先提出一种在虚拟环境（VE）中诱发焦虑的通用技术，该技术利用听觉心跳感知和生物反馈。然后，我们考虑一个再现现实世界中诱发焦虑体验（在建筑物火灾疏散期间突然被烟雾包围）的虚拟环境，并描述一个对比三种情况的实验：（i）用一个指示用户化身何时受伤的条对虚拟环境进行增强，（ii）当用户化身受伤时用暴力电子游戏中使用的典型视听刺激对虚拟环境进行增强，（iii）在前一种情况下引入所提出的生物反馈技术。我们进行了一项皮电分析，结果表明，与其他两种情况相比，所提出技术的引入在皮肤电导水平（SCL）方面产生了更高的生理唤醒。用户状态焦虑的主观测量结果与记录的生理反应一致。
