Designing immersive affective environments with biofeedback

Abstract

Serious games have been recognized in many application areas such as heath, education and training. Designing interactive games responsive to user emotions improves their effectiveness and user acceptances. A major factor in user interaction is the emotional reaction to game scenarios, which has motivated us to analyze immersive games using biofeedback. In this article, a graph-based model is presented to design interactive games in a systematic way. This model is combined with biofeedback such as autonomic nervous system variables to evaluate user emotional reaction to different stimuli. The analysis should be used as a guiding principle for designing serious games. Oculus Rift DK2 is used in experiments to provide immersive virtual reality with affective scenarios. The experiments demonstrate the ability to induce measurable and differentiate emotions.