What if expressive arts therapy comes across Virtual Reality (VR)? Can VR enhance the social connections among the youth via collaborative art creation to improve mental well-being and empathy during this challenging time?
Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) is a networked environment in which multiple users share the same set of virtual scenes and virtual worlds and participate in collaborative tasks or simply socialising via their own enabling devices, such as Head-mounted Displays (HMDs). The CVE's ability to offer a wide set of verbal and non-verbal social cues during avatar-mediated communication makes it a promising medium to deliver psychotherapeutic sessions remotely; besides connecting therapists and clients who might be in different physical locations, the medium can support social interactions that are close to the face-to-face experience while keeping the privacy of clients protected if they desire to do so.
The collaborative art creation processes in the CVE aim to provide a channel for the youth to express themselves in visual arts together with the psychologists and therapists, expel their stress or negative emotion, improve their mental well-being, and enhance their empathy.
The results of our pilot case study suggested that CVE-enabled remote art therapy could bring a strong sense of copresence and social presence. Thus the triangular relationship between the therapist, the clients, and the artworks could be translated and maintained in CVE. Moreover, the approach was technically feasible, and we plan to conduct further studies on its effectiveness on a broader population.