A Trip to the Moon: Personalized Animated Movies for Self-reflection

TL;DR

This study explores personalized animated movies created from self-tracking data to enhance emotional engagement and self-reflection, demonstrating their potential to motivate users through tailored visual narratives.

Contribution

It introduces a method for generating personalized animated movies from self-reported data and evaluates their impact on emotional engagement and self-reflection.

Findings

Personalized videos increased emotional engagement.

Participants wrote more about their moods and behaviors.

Personalized animations fostered deeper self-reflection.

Abstract

Self-tracking physiological and psychological data poses the challenge of presentation and interpretation. Insightful narratives for self-tracking data can motivate the user towards constructive self-reflection. One powerful form of narrative that engages audience across various culture and age groups is animated movies. We collected a week of self-reported mood and behavior data from each user and created in Unity a personalized animation based on their data. We evaluated the impact of their video in a randomized control trial with a non-personalized animated video as control. We found that personalized videos tend to be more emotionally engaging, encouraging greater and lengthier writing that indicated self-reflection about moods and behaviors, compared to non-personalized control videos.