# Connecting the Elderly Using VR: A Novel Art-Driven Methodology
## 4 Results
### Cap de Ballon VR  
The VR world was inspired by [PERSON]'s project _Last Life_[17; 18] conceived in 2008 and exhibited online and in a show in 2009. This metaverse project was based on the economy of attention model. A city-like environment provided virtual citizens with the possibility to settle in a specific home and open windows to the world to share their life. Stopping in front of a window, passers-by could watch users' created content. The size of the window was determined by the cumulated attention, stimulating citizens to improve their content. While Last Life was an ironic response to Second Life, \"Cap de Ballon\" addressed very different issues, i.e., how to increase seniors' level of sociability by inviting them to value their life and sharing the best in it.  
In general, \"Cap de Ballon\" is a 3D VR village that encompasses elements of several real-world places. The main goal of the village is to stimulate seniors' memory and improve social connection by bringing seniors and their friends and family into a platform where they can share content of common interests and interact with each other (Figure 6).  
The VR village, built upon a large-scale rocky context, is surrounded by water and has whitewashed houses that reference Greek Cycladic architecture. All houses were organized around a main road that ran through the whole village. Different neighborhoods exist in the village corresponding to different themes selected by seniors and are organized into four thematic categories: (1) art and architecture and cinema, (2) nature, (3) health, food, and physical activity, and (4) events (history, memory, family, local life). Each neighborhood can be distinguished from one another by color. Each house has different colored windows and parapets according to the neighborhood theme they belonged to. Additionally, big balloons fly above each neighborhood, so that users can easily identify the neighborhood they prefer to visit from a distance.  
Content produced by seniors such as videos, pictures, and slideshows are displayed on the windows of the houses (Figure 7). The longer a viewer looks at a window, the more the window enlarges, in response to the viewer's attention. Visitors can also find several items, named \"landmarks\", scattered in the village, such as monkeys, ice-cream cart, golf cart etc., which are used to signal entrances or exterior meeting places. Furthermore, there is a clear distinction between outside and inside spaces. In the outside space, seniors can explore and navigate through the village, visit different neighborhoods and themes, and watch different content. In interior spaces, one per neighborhood, seniors can gather in smaller groups and discuss specific topics. Seniors themselves contributing to the co-creation aspect of the village required visual elements such as ice-cream carts or the use of emoticons.  
Using a VR platform, seniors were able to explore the village they had co-designed with artists, software engineers, and architects. The interiors they could enter were decorated with objects scanned from one of our subjects' homes along with new objects created during the redesign of the apartment by architects. The platform provided the possibility to the  
Figure 6: Cap de Ballon: (**a**) outdoors view and (**b**) indoors view.  
seniors to communicate with others inside the VR environment. Moreover, seniors could teleport to other windows and neighborhoods. To express their emotions, they could use emoticons and were able to interact with a variety of objects (e.g., balls).