Flow with the Beat! Human-Centered Design of Virtual Environments for Musical Creativity Support in VR

As previous studies have shown, the environment of creative people can have a significant impact on their creative process and thus on their creations. However, with the advent of digital tools such as virtual instruments and digital audio workstations, more and more creative work is digital and decoupled from the creator’s environment. Virtual Reality technologies open up new possibilities here, as creative tools can seamlessly merge with any virtual environment the user finds himself in. This paper reports on the human-centered design process of a VR application that aims at supporting the user’s individual needs to support their creativity while composing percussive beats in virtual environments. For this purpose, we derived factors that influence creativity from literature and conducted focus group interviews in order to learn how virtual environments and 3DUI can be designed for creativity support. In a subsequent laboratory study, we let users interact with a virtual step sequencer UI in virtual environments that were either customizable or fixed/unchangeable. By analyzing post-test ratings from music experts, self-report questionnaires, and user behavior data, we examined the effects of such customizable virtual environments on user creativity, user experience, flow, and subjective creativity support scales. While we did not observe a significant impact of this independent variable on user creativity, user experience or flow, we found that users had specific individual needs regarding their virtual surroundings and strongly preferred customizable virtual environments, even though the fixed virtual environment was designed to be creatively stimulating. We also observed consistently high flow and user experience ratings, which promote human-centered design of VR-based creativity support tools in a musical context.