Introduction
Mental disorders such as mood and anxiety disorders are problems that are, and will continue to be, prevalent in the current world. The virtual world can confer many therapeutic benefits over naturalistic or traditional therapeutic situations, because it can provide a controlled environment where feelings of sadness or fear can be elicited for purposes such as understanding how an individual experiences and reacts in these situations. Virtual Reality (VR), the use of technology to create a simulated environment, has been shown to be an effective medium for psychotherapeutic techniques and can evoke the same reactions and emotions as a real experience in a stressor environment with the ability to manipulate the environment of the patient in an easy and safe way. VR has also started to become more prevalent in the entertainment industry and the elicitation of emotion can help in storytelling, making VR applicable in this context as well.
One of the advantages of using VR for rehabilitation compared to purely visual mediums, such as video, is the ability for interaction, the degree to which users of a medium can influence the virtual environment (VE), yet there has surprisingly been minimal research on its effect in evoking emotions. Being able to manipulate emotions not only gives us a better understanding of the psychology around them, but also shows us how we can provide better therapeutic treatment or better entertainment experiences.
When agents are present in a VE it is important to have a believable Artificial Intelligence (AI), which in this context is the use of algorithms to generate responsive and adaptive behaviors in non-player characters. For the behaviors to be believable, they need to be emergent, where the AI has different reactions to events depending on the context of the environment and the user’s behavior. These emergent behaviors are vital for making the reactions of the VE seem more realistic.
