The Pulse Breath Water System: Exploring Breathing as an Embodied Interaction for Enhancing the Affective Potential of Virtual Reality

We introduce Pulse Breath Water, an immersive virtual environment (VE) with affect estimation in sound. We employ embodied interaction between a user and the system through the user’s breathing frequencies mapped to the system’s behaviour. In this study we investigate how two different mappings (metaphoric, and “reverse”) of embodied interaction design might enhance the affective properties of the presented system. We build on previous work in embodied cognition, embodied interaction, and affect estimation in sound by examining the impact of affective audiovisuals and two kinds of interaction mapping on the user’s engagement, affective states, and overall experience. The insights gained through questionnaires and semi-structured interviews are discussed in the context of participants’ lived experience and the limitations of the system to be addressed in future work.

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