Content for extended reality is an aesthetic experience combining a series of multifaceted media, which combined offers a unique experience to its users. Unlike traditional media, extended reality content allows users to interact and observe this content using a large variety of methods. Such interactivity leads to a series of opportunities and even questions as to how these virtual worlds are perceived, interacted with or how they influence the player themselves, both from a physiological and emotional perspective. This Research Topic tasked authors to submit their work exploring this especially daunting task, inviting multi-faceted research including Research Topic such as affective computing, procedural content generation, game content orchestration, human computer interaction and human physiological reaction to the content. One of the main difficulties when dealing with interactive content is the collection of data, classifying this data into an emotional recognition task and subsequently using this recognition to alter the game in some meaningful capacity. The first and second tasks can be a difficult due to the nature of extended reality media devices themselves, which are often active endeavours complicating the collection of physiological data, it can also decrease the effectiveness of traditional facial recognition methods due to the hardware that is being used (e.g., Head Mounted Devices, or HMD), and the heavy reliance on user annotations which itself can often be highly relative and conflicting among the population. Thus, this Research Topic focused on several aspects of the latter Research Topic, by exploring the current technological trend in HMD technologies - i.e., eye-tracking devices and integrated EEG/EMG; and how this data could be used to model human affect.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frvir.2023.1235004/full