RAPID: Leveraging Virtual Reality to Improve Compliance with Physical Distancing

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Physical distancing is currently the most effective countermeasure against the rapid proliferation of the virus that causes COVID-19, and scientific projections indicate that these practices will be necessary for a year or possibly even longer. As the current circumstances are unprecedented, the compliance rate for physical distancing over an extended period of time is unknown. Many people, especially young adults, typically being used to active social life, can find this physical/social distancing leading to social isolation. Unfortunately, social isolation is strongly associated with negative outcomes for mental health and therefore represents a serious threat to long-term compliance. Mitigating the negative impact of physical distancing on social-emotional wellbeing is therefore paramount, as failure to consistently maintain these practices could result in additional outbreaks or a rebound of the pandemic. To address this enormous threat to global public health, this project leverages virtual reality technologies to facilitate group social interaction that is potentially unsafe to experience in the real world. Virtual Reality (VR) provides the capability to interact with other people in a shared 3D environment, thereby opening the doors for a multitude of shared experiences and activities that would not be possible with other remote communication modalities such as videoconferencing. The aim of this project is to promote the use of web-based VR technology as a safer environment that mitigates the effect of social isolation, leading to better psychological health. The challenge here is the lack of a broader variety of VR content, as well as shared activities that capture the imagination, which would make it compelling and engaging to spend time in the virtual environments. To address this challenge, this project will catalyze a community effort for crowd-sourced or user-generated VR content (or environments) and shared activities to facilitate virtual social interaction during the pandemic, thereby contributing to worldwide efforts to encourage physical distancing. This effort will involve the longitudinal investigation of virtual reality usage and social-emotional wellbeing, which will lead to new insights for the design and development of technology-mediated support systems. With the COVID-19 pandemic continuing for months, significantly large fluctuations in the number of people getting infected are being observed. This has resulted in prolonged recommendations of social/physical distancing. For many, especially for people used to a socially active lifestyle, such extended social distancing leads to social isolation that adversely impacts mental health. To mitigate this, this project will enable the use of web-based VR for overcoming social isolation without endangering human health due to physical proximity. In this context, there is a distinct need to create engaging VR environments and shared activities that can be customized for different social groups. This project is divided into three phases: an immediate response to deploy and facilitate the use of online social virtual environments; medium-term activities to catalyze a broader community effort; and a long-term plan for ongoing support and empirical evaluation. In order to rapidly address the urgent need, the first phase will involve: (1) using a web-based infrastructure, creation of new VR environments and shared activities, and deploying and distributing them; (2) creation of onboarding procedures, tutorial videos, and public-facing documentation; and (3) outreach through news outlets and social media to promote their use as an alternative medium for social interaction during the pandemic. Over the medium-term, a broader community effort will be organized to create a diverse collection of user-generated content and shared activities, to maintain engagement over an extended period of time. To this end, surveys will be conducted to identify technical gaps, generate ideas for new scenarios and content, and establish guidelines for the community. The project will continue to support this community effort over the long term. Additionally, a longitudinal study will be conducted to evaluate the impact of virtual reality usage, social-emotional wellbeing, and physical distancing behaviors. Design guidelines and scientific results produced under this project will be widely disseminated to inform the design and development of future virtual reality technologies and applications.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.