Mapping the Landscape of Affective Extended Reality: A Scoping Review of Biodata-Driven Systems for Understanding and Sharing Emotions

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive mapping of affective extended reality systems that utilize biodata to understand and share emotions, highlighting current designs, challenges, and future research opportunities.

Contribution

It offers the first systematic scoping review of biodata-driven affective XR systems, mapping their technologies, interaction techniques, and evaluation methods.

Findings

Diverse goals in emotion sharing systems identified

Key design dimensions and challenges analyzed

Opportunities for future research highlighted

Abstract

This paper introduces the notion of affective extended reality (XR) to characterise XR systems that use biodata to enable understanding of emotions. The HCI literature contains many such systems, but they have not yet been mapped into a coherent whole. To address this, we conducted a scoping review of 82 papers that explore the nexus of biodata, emotions, and XR. We analyse the technologies used in these systems, the interaction techniques employed, and the methods used to evaluate their effectiveness. Through our analysis, we contribute a mapping of the current landscape of affective XR, revealing diversity in the goals for enabling emotion sharing. We demonstrate how HCI researchers have explored the design of the interaction flows in XR biofeedback systems, highlighting key design dimensions and challenges in understanding emotions. We discuss underused approaches for emotion sharing and highlight opportunities for future research on affective XR.