HoleyMoley: A Cognitive Assessment for Emotion Recognition in Virtual Reality
Abstract
Over the years, cognitive assessments have been conducted using pen-and-paper, personal computers, and smartphone applications. As virtual reality (VR) is quickly becoming the next generation of computing, we investigated how it can be used in this field through the development of a game called HoleyMoley. HoleyMoley is a Whac-a-Mole game that combines elements of two commonly used cognitive assessments: a choice reaction task and an emotion recognition task. When we first created HoleyMoley, we largely based it on a computer-based assessment. However, an evaluation with 15 young adults did not reveal any significant findings that we expected from literature. It was not until we integrated multiple modalities — the controller, gaze, and speech — that we were able to recover statistically significant differences in how individuals react to emotional stimuli. This paper details the design process of HoleyMoley as a case study for future cognitive assessment in VR.
Authors: Andrii Lenyshyn, You Zhi Hu, Mark Chignell, Alex T. Mariakakis
Published in: ACM Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI PLAY) (2024)