Council of Coaches in Virtual Reality

COUCH is an autonomous, multiagent and interactive demonstrator that allows the user to participate in a virtual council meeting to motivate and inform about health and wellbeing related issues, including physical, social, cognitive and mental support. The council meeting will take place between virtual characters and the user. This research aims to determine how a new 3D modelled environment can influence the engagement of older adults with the COUCH system in Virtual Reality (VR). Based on the related work, a literature review, user confrontation and user scenarios four different prototypes were made, called Beach2D, BeachVR, Forest2D and Forest VR. Three studies were conducted to evaluate the effect of the different components in the screen-based prototypes, the difference in experience between the screen-based and VR prototypes and the effect of the different components in the VR prototypes.