School’s Back: Scaffolding Reminiscence in Social Virtual Reality with Older Adults

Abstract

Social virtual reality (social VR) is an emerging technology that has the potential to support unique social experiences for groups of older adults. In this paper we explore the use of social VR to support group reminiscence, an activity that has been shown to have a positive impact on the lives of older adults. We developed School Days, a bespoke social VR application that enables groups of geographically dispersed older adults to meet in a virtual environment to reminisce about their school experiences. We conducted a user study over the course of 5 months with 16 participants aged 70--81 to evaluate how School Days supported reminiscence. In this paper, we focus on how the use of reminisc..