Comparing a Simple, At-Home Self-Counselling Virtual Reality Experience, To a Full-Scale Virtual Reality Setup

Mouritzen, Jeppe Nygaard ; Jægerlund, Martin Fritzbøger

4. term

Medialogy, Master

2025

2025-05-25

55 pages

The purpose of this study was to compare a simplified version of the prototype created by Slater et al. in their project ”An experimental study of a virtual reality counselling paradigm using embodied self-dialogue”, to their original one. The researchers had a meeting with Østre Gasværk, a psychiatric institution in Denmark that houses people with mental struggles, and from that meeting the researchers noticed the interest in such a project. The prototype developed was a Virtual Reality Self Counselling application, that made users speak with themselves. Doing this draws upon the term "Solomon’s Paradox", which reasons that people are better at discussing other people’s problems rather than their own. The prototype was tested at Aalborg University Copenhagen, where a total of 11 participants were recruited. Given the low participant number, it is difficult to give a definitive answer as to whether the prototype succeeded, however, the results do show the potential for the prototype to have the same results as that of Slater et al.. Due to the tighter time-constraints and the scope of the project, the testing phase was not up to the desired standard the researchers wanted. If more participants had been through it would have been more optimal to compare with other papers, that had a bigger participation pool. The conclusion is that there is potential in the project to be further developed and show good results. For this to happen, it is necessary that more testing is done, and that some testing is done on people with a diagnosis to see their response to a product like this.

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