VR research

My starting point for VR research was this website: https://thinkmobiles.com/blog/creating-vr-content/ I would need a 360 video camera, a VR headset and software capable of stitching and editing the footage. There were cost implications with this as I had none of the above to hand. I contacted uni to see if there was any chance I could arrange to pick up a 360 camera from the photography store, but no luck there. I contacted a couple of people I thought might have one I could borrow, but no luck there either. In the end I bought a 2nd hand Samsung Gear 360 which comes with its own software called Action Director. I bought a Google cardboard headset from Amazon and watched a few videos of art installations on You Tube. I was surprised how easy it was to view 360 footage with the Cardboard headset.

I wasnted to know if there were any 360 videos of art installations, so I Googled it and found a few. This gave me some indication as to whether it might work in this case. I also wondered about the therapeutic uses of VR especially regarding mental health, but more specifically if I could find anything about VR art being used therapeutically. But I couldn't find much. There was loads about it being used in psychotherapy to help people with anxiety, depression, phobias, PTSD etc but nothing about its use in art. Search terms used in Summon:

• therapeutic VR art

• VR art therapies

• therapeutic use of VR artworks to improve mental health

There was some information about using VR in art therapy, but this was more about creative expression than about improving mental health. I found a paper about the use of VR nature which I thought might be useful. In the same way that nature has been shown to be beneficial for mental well-being, so has art-viewing so although there's a gap in the research about VR art, I think this paper is useful in an argument for the use of VR art-viewing as being beneficial for mental well-being.