Gupta, K., Chan, S. W. T., Pai, Y. S., Strachan, N., Su, J., Sumich, A., ... & Billinghurst, M. (2022). Total VREcall: using biosignals to recognize emotional autobiographical memory in virtual reality. Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, 6(2), 1-21.

Abstract

Our memories and past experiences contribute to guiding our perception and action of future affective experiences. Virtual Reality (VR) experiences are more vividly memorized and recalled than non-VR ones, but there is little research on how to detect this recall in VR. We investigate the feasibility of recognizing autobiographical memory (AM) recall in VR using physiological cues: skin conductance, heart-rate variability, eye gaze, and pupillary response. We devised a methodology replicating an existing AM Test in VR. We conducted a user study with 20 participants recalling AM using three valence categories cue words: positive, negative, and neutral. We found a significant effect of AM recalls on EDA peak, and eye blink rate, with a generalized recognition accuracy of 77.1% and person dependent accuracy of up to 95.1%. This shows a promising approach for detecting AM recall in VR and we discuss the implications for VR experience design. 

[Ubicomp Distinguished Paper Award 2023]