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Anxiety VR Project

Anxiety disorders form a category of mental health diagnoses that lead to excessive nervousness, fear, apprehension, and worry. I want to create a virtual experience space to help ordinary people understand anxiety patients.

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Role

Research, Ideation, visuals, Prototyping

Timeline

2/15/2020 - 4/15/2020 

Tools Used 

Adobe CC, Unity, C4D

When my friend with anxiety disorder tells me he doesn't get the understanding of his family and friends around him. His family felt he was making excuses for his stress, while his friends thought he was too sensitive. I am very sympathetic to this and think about how we can make people understand anxiety disorders better.

Background

Anxiety disorders form a mental health diagnosis category that leads to excessive nervousness, fear, apprehension, and worry. These disorders alter how a person processes emotions and behaves, causing physical symptoms. Mild anxiety might be vague and unsettling, while severe anxiety may seriously affect day-to-day living.

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Five symptom when you first encounter anxiety
  • Liver reactions: When the body produces cortisol, the liver produces more glucose. This causes a spike in your blood sugar levels, which, if not used, could be reabsorbed through the body.

  • Skin reactions: Our response to stress increases our blood flow, causing a redistribution throughout the body. This causes some people to become paler as a reaction, while others tend to flush.

  • An active spleen: To get more oxygen to the body during an anxious episode, the spleen discharges more red and white blood cells.

  • Tense muscles: When the body first experiences stress, the muscles immediately seize as a reflex reaction.

  • Throat troubles: Fluids are dispersed to different parts of the body during episodes of anxiety. This causes the throat to become dry and the throat muscles to tighten

Five symptom when you have long term anxiety
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Case Study: Mike
(GENERALIZED ANXIETY DISORDER)

Mike, 25 years old, feels very frustrated. He works in a financial company in New York and is under the high pressure of life. He spends most of his time at work and rarely takes a little time to relax and do what he likes. He seldom goes to entertainment venues and avoids learning about things that have nothing to do with him. When noted that he "may be fired." he had difficulty concentrating on communicating because he was busy worrying about how they would look at him. If he loses his job, maybe people all feel him "loser." He often lost his concentration on interaction, overanxious all the time. Sometimes he would be absent-minded, which only made him uneasy. He also replayed the conversation repeatedly, focusing on what he said maybe looks "stupid."

Mike has a social anxiety disorder, which should be the primary treatment goal. When he came home from work after a busy day, he stayed in his home and looked at the pedestrians and vehicles coming and going downstairs. Then keep working busily at home. He wants to join friends but is also afraid to be unable to fit in with their conversation. Since working, he has been isolated from the outside world, refused the invitations to eat or hang out, and ignored the phone when the phone rang. He cares too much about others' attitudes and views, which prompted him to have avoidance behaviors. The fearful attitude and negative ideas keep driving him more and more despair, isolation and tend worthlessness.

My Points 

Many situations are challenging to understand through language descriptions. It is also difficult to understand these patients with anxiety disorders' moods, challenges, and conditions. My point is that if we could get a deeper understanding of the lives and feelings of these patients through their perspectives. The eye is the index of the heart. So I think through eye observation, I can understand their feelings better.

Design Purpose

I want to create a virtual experience space to help ordinary people understand anxiety patients. I hope that they can understand the life of anxiety patients through this experience:

•Realizing that anxiety disorder is a pervasive problem, it may exist between you and me.

•People with anxiety disorders have the identical ordinary life as us, except that they have pressure from different aspects.

 

•I hope it can cause concern for people with anxiety.

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 Interaction Framework
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