# Connecting the Elderly Using VR: A Novel Art-Driven Methodology
## 4 Results
### Cap de Ballon VR Evaluation  
After the two evaluation experimentation sessions (see Figure 8a-c) of the first two prototypes of the village, which were tested in a desktop environment, we concluded with a final prototype, the VR one, shown in the previous section, also evaluated by our test group of seniors. In these sessions, we were also interested in grasping the main feelings of our subjects and impressions when navigating in the village. The evaluation questionnaires included elements related to social connections, pleasantness, and memory. The scope of the questionnaires was twofold: (1) to gain a general evaluation of the village's concept including its originality and its utility to fight loneliness and stimulate creativity and (2) to evaluate the level of satisfaction regarding seniors' experience in the village. After the last evaluation phase, regarding the VR version of the virtual village,  
Figure 7: Cap de Ballon: content windows. we asked the participants to state using a 5-level Likert scale (1--strongly disagree to 5--strongly agree) if the use of the virtual village would ameliorate the quality of their daily life from a social perspective. More specifically, we wanted to use their normal everyday life as a baseline to observe if the introduction of a VR environment like the one we proposed would make them more socially extrovert. The results are represented in Figures 9 and 10. Regarding the first, 71% of senior testers strongly agreed and 29% agreed that the village stimulated creativity. A total of 57% of senior testers agreed that the village stimulated social connection between seniors, and 43% affirmed that the village has this potential provided seniors understand well its functionalities and are more comfortable with its usage. A total of 57% of senior testers agreed that the concept of the village is original, while 43% of them strongly agreed. A total of 71% of seniors would inv  
Figure 8: Evaluation sessions with participants. friends to join the village, and 29% of seniors would recommend the village provided their entourage is familiar with VR. A total of 72% of seniors found the VR easy to use, i.e., there was no dizziness, and only 29% felt some kind of discomfort but 43% felt disoriented. For 43% of seniors, the village triggered direct memories and for 29%, the village could trigger additional memories provided they were able to publish and explore more content. For 86%, the memories triggered were positive. A total of 43% of seniors were completely satisfied or very satisfied with their experience while 57% were moderately and slightly satisfied. In the following figure and table (Figure 9, Table 3), you can see some comparative results between the desktop and VR versions of the village. Finally, the subjects experienced no dizziness during the VR experimentation session. More specifically, most of the subjects felt comfortable (71%) while some felt disoriented (43%). In general, after appropriate explanations and practice, the VR version of the social platform was easy to use for most of the seniors (72%). Figure 10: Before and after the use of the VR village. Figure 9: Desktop vs. VR (**a**) social aspect perception and (**b**) recommendation. In order to assess the VR environment regarding the sentiment of its use evoked in our subjects during the experimentation phase, we implemented the procedure shown in Figure 5. Arousal (or intensity) is the level of activation that an experience creates and ranges from calm (or low) to normal (medium) and excited (or high). On the other hand, valence is the degree of pleasantness that an experience generates and is defined from negative to positive. In our experiments results values between [0,0.33) are equivalent to negative/calm valence/arousal, values from [0.33,0.66) are equivalent to neutral valence/arousal, and values in the interval [0.66,1] correspond to positive/excited valence and arousal correspondingly.