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Social media has changed how individuals cope with health challenges in good and bad ways. Especially for stigmatized mental health conditions like depression, groups and communities offer positive outcomes for those suffering from mental illness. However, in some mental health communities, individuals promote deliberate self-injury, disordered eating habits, and suicidal ideas as acceptable choices rather than dangerous actions.

More and more people today are using activity trackers like Fitbit and connecting them to their social media like Twitter. And what more, some people make their daily quantified activity time series public. So on one hand, we have their entire twitter network in the form of timelines, friends, followers and their entire network and on the other hand, we have their entire workout data. We are trying to answer some interesting question from these two sets of data.

The purpose of this project is to validate the following research question – “Would testing UI prototypes in a simulated virtual reality environment provide a better experience to testing in a usability lab setting? ‘Better experience’ is defined as the system having better usability, lower cognitive workload and higher user satisfaction.”. I want to explore how VR could be used as a platform to test mobile and desktop UI prototypes in a way that adds virtual environments during usability testing, and to see if users respond better than not having any environmental cues.