Unveiling Emotions in Virtual Reality: Exploring Personal Narratives of US Veterans on VR Chat

The surge in popularity of social virtual reality (VR) social platforms, exemplified by platforms like VR Chat, underscores a growing trend of individuals seeking social interactions through immersive digital environments. These platforms offer participants a unique avenue for connection, often attributed to the anonymity of avatars. However, empirical exploration of the depth of personal and emotional experience sharing within such platforms remains limited. This article addresses this gap by investigating the emotional content and nuanced experience shared by US veterans on a prominent social VR platform. Drawing from a dataset of seven YouTube videos from the channel “@syrmor,” capturing conversations on VR Chat, this study employs thematic segmentation to identify recurring topics of discussion. Noteworthy themes include drug abuse, mental health, pre-military circumstances, PTSD, and physical injuries. Furthermore, emotional analysis, utilizing the BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) language model, unveils prevalent emotions within these interactions such as fear, sadness, and anger, with significant contrasts to emotions like love and joy. Radar charts visualize these emotions across segments, painting a comprehensive picture of the emotional dynamics within each conversation. Overall, this study sheds light on the significance of VR social platforms as digital spaces for personal narratives and emotional sharing.