Differential Brain Activation for Four Emotions in VR-2D and VR-3D Modes

Similar to traditional imaging, virtual reality (VR) imagery encompasses nonstereoscopic (VR-2D) and stereoscopic (VR-3D) modes. Currently, Russell’s emotional model has been extensively studied in traditional 2D and VR-3D modes, but there is limited comparative research between VR-2D and VR-3D modes. In this study, we investigate whether Russell’s emotional model exhibits stronger brain activation states in VR-3D mode compared to VR-2D mode. By designing an experiment covering four emotional categories (high arousal–high pleasure (HAHV), high arousal–low pleasure (HALV), low arousal–low pleasure (LALV), and low arousal–high pleasure (LAHV)), EEG signals were collected from 30 healthy undergraduate and graduate students while watching videos in both VR modes. Initially, power spectral density (PSD) computations revealed distinct brain activation patterns in different emotional states across the two modes, with VR-3D videos inducing significantly higher brainwave energy, primarily in the frontal, temporal, and occipital regions. Subsequently, Differential entropy (DE) feature sets, selected via a dual ten-fold cross-validation Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier, demonstrate satisfactory classification accuracy, particularly superior in the VR-3D mode. The paper subsequently presents a deep learning-based EEG emotion recognition framework, adeptly utilizing the frequency, spatial, and temporal information of EEG data to improve recognition accuracy. The contribution of each individual feature to the prediction probabilities is discussed through machine-learning interpretability based on Shapley values. The study reveals notable differences in brain activation states for identical emotions between the two modes, with VR-3D mode showing more pronounced activation.