The primary goal of this thesis is to explore the effects that sharing emotional cues through physiological feedback has on overall emotional states of the users in both single-user and collaborative applications.

The motivation of this research has been derived, in part, from the work being undertaken by my co-supervisor Prof. Mark Billinghurst in the emerging field of Empathic Computing. He illustrated ”Empathic Computing requires a combination of rich natural collaboration, capturing the user experience and surroundings, and being able to implicitly understand user emotion and con- text”. This thesis explores the aspects of capturing, interpreting and sharing the user experience in virtual environments by way of physiological data.

In this thesis, five user studies were conducted in order to study how physi- ological data could be recorded, classified and shared amongst individuals in a multi-user VE with the aim of evoking empathy. Validation of a multi-sensory physiological feedback system is detailed in Chapter 3. This demonstrates that individuals prefer an audio-haptic feedback system when being provided with heart rate data. Results from a follow-up study (Chapter 4) demonstrate that artificially manipulating physiological data parameters shared with an individual has a significant effect on the observer’s physiological signals. The rest of the studies detailed in this thesis take an application-based approach to the research question and implement the findings in multi-user VEs to study the effects of sharing physiological data in a VE during a shared experience.

The results of these studies demonstrate that sharing physiological cues between users of a VE helps generate positive affect i.e. the individuals feel a greater sense of connectivity amongst each other, and report higher levels of presence. Sharing of the physiological cues also appears to help users get a sense of each other’s emotional states in the VEs. These findings demonstrate that sharing physiological data, representative of emotions, amongst users in a VE has the ability to improve interactions by way of eliciting empathy. Also, by manipulating physiological feedback, emotions of users could be affected to some extent.