Virtual experiences support real emotions

Emotions permeate life, they are present in all our experiences, also when we interact with advanced communication media. It is well known that affective dimension is an important part of user experience in interactive media and many studies showed their ability to elicit emotions. Nevertheless it's not clear enough how to manipulate the interactive media features to induce specific emotional responses. In particular this is true for emerging media, such as Virtual Reality (VR), which main feature is the ability to induce a feeling of presence in the computer-generated world experienced by the user. The goal of the book is to understand the processes through which we manage our affective experience by using the most advanced communication media and clarify the relationship between presence and emotions in interactive experiences trough three experimental studies. The analysis should be especially useful for researchers interested in technical, cognitive and affective factors connected to virtual experiences and for professionals interested in using virtual technologies at their best in several fields such as communication, education, wellbeing and therapy.