Abstract

Social isolation is a vast problem in todays world, that mostly affects specially one group of people, elderly. The isolation of elderly fellow citizens increases continuously, developing to worldwide crisis due to its negative influence on mental health resulting in disease like depression. To tackle this problem, a Virtual Reality shopping simulation is further developed to create a social experience for elderly people. Thereby, multiuser functionality is added to allow collective use of the simulation. Furthermore, copresence is improved by adding a voice chat, and design and animate a full body avatar that is mapped to the Oculus Quest 2 tracking devices. However, in the first phase of development, a study is conducted to assess the previous state of the simulation. The study showed all in all great results for the general VR simulation characteristics immersion, presence and interactivity. Moreover, the store design was experienced appealing and showed great improvements to a previous study. On the contrary, the AV smartphone, replacing the left VR controller as input device, faced multiple issues that have to be addressed in the future. Although its usability lacked behind, it showed great potential for future use.

Results/Implementation/Project Description

Conclusion

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