Cardboard VR Games for Rehabilitation of Emotion Recognition

Abstract

Many individuals struggle to recognize the emotional and affective states of those around them, particularly in identifying facial expressions, which impacts their social interactions. These difficulties are common in disorders such as autism spectrum disorder, schizophrenia, and social anxiety. To provide new therapeutic tools, this study presents four games designed with specific approaches to train emotional recognition within a low-cost immersive virtual reality environment using mobile applications and Cardboard headsets. Each game targets a key aspect of emotional recognition. The first focuses on associating emotions with phrases, facilitating the connection between language and emotional expression. The second trains the identification of emotions in moving characters within an urban setting, promoting the interpretation of emotional cues in dynamic contexts. The third incorporates emoticons with motor tasks to reinforce learning through color association and impulse regulation. The fourth, memory-based, strengthens retention and emotional recognition through structured repetition. With the guide and support of a psychiatrist, these games have been designed to correctly represent emotions, fostering social skills which, added to the incorporation of progressive feedback, improves the user’s emotion identification. An initial evaluation has yielded positive results, demonstrating the potential of these games as complementary tools in therapies aimed at enhancing social cognition.