"If I were in Space": Understanding and Adapting to Social Isolation through Designing Collaborative Narratives

TL;DR

This study explores how collaborative storytelling in social VR helps individuals in quarantine understand and adapt to social isolation by revealing their coping strategies through creative narrative design.

Contribution

It introduces a novel narrative-based virtual reality method to uncover adaptive strategies for social isolation, emphasizing the role of storytelling over traditional interventions.

Findings

Participants revealed diverse coping strategies through their narrative designs.

Engagement in storytelling positively influenced participants' adaptation to isolation.

The approach offers a new way to understand social isolation experiences.

Abstract

Social isolation can lead to pervasive health issues like anxiety and loneliness. Previous work focused on physical interventions like exercise and teleconferencing, but overlooked the narrative potential of adaptive strategies. To address this, we designed a collaborative online storytelling experience in social VR, enabling participants in isolation to design an imaginary space journey as a metaphor for quarantine, in order to learn about their isolation adaptation strategies in the process. Eighteen individuals participated during real quarantine undertaken a virtual role-play experience, designing their own spaceship rooms and engaging in collaborative activities that revealed creative adaptative strategies. Qualitative analyses of participant designs, transcripts, and interactions revealed how they coped with isolation, and how the engagement unexpectedly influenced their adaptation process. This study shows how designing playful narrative experiences, rather than solution-driven approaches, can serve as probes to surface how people navigate social isolation.