Interacting with your Thoughts / VR Application for a Gamified Intervention for Psychological Disorders

While VR Treatment is used successfully in Anxiety and Phobia Treatment, VR Depression Treatment still is experimental and largely unexplored at this point, among other things because of the abstract nature of the disease. At the same time Depression is one of the most common Psychological Disorders. In this thesis we want to explore how a gamified approach to confront negative and positive thoughts can be implemented in VR and if it can help improving the wellbeing of affected people. To do so, you develop different representations of thoughts and explore possible interaction with them. A user study evaluating a first prototype and the following analysis of the results will conclude the work.

Work packages for this Thesis include:

• Literature review on self-tracking apps and digital diaries, mood tracking, positive computing, etc.
• Implementation of a Unity 3D VR Environment
• Design of multiple VR Interactions and Visualizations of Thoughts
• Evaluation of a first prototype

Your profile:

• Interest in Psychology and Psychological Treatment
• Basic Programming Experience
• First Experience with Unity 3D
• Enthusiasm for VR (VR Experience)

If you are interested, please send an Email with a brief introduction to julian.rasch ät ifi.lmu.de This thesis is co-supervised by Sophia Sakel.