Designing an Immersive Virtual Reality Scenario for Social Anxiety Elicitation and Modeling: A Preliminary Evaluation

We describe an immersive Virtual Environment (VE) designed and developed to record physiological and behavioral data to identify a computational model for real-time subjective anxiety estimation. The VE represents a waiting room with several chairs. Virtual Reality (VR) avatars come into the room and sit around the subject, sitting each in one of the available chairs, following two different strategies. Different forms of interaction between the avatars and the subject have been implemented. This paper presents preliminary tests of the VE conducted with 24 healthy volunteers self-reporting possible symptoms of Social Anxiety Disorder, who were invited to continuously report their subjective level of discomfort through the VR controller. Once integrated with the answers given to questionnaires aimed at investigating anxiety states and immersiveness in the VE, these preliminary results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed scenario as a novel and useful tool for robustly eliciting and assessing states of social anxiety in a realistic but nevertheless controllable and acceptable way.