Designing State-Contingent Visual Displays of Anxiety for Immersive Wellbeing Displays

With rising rates of student anxiety and burnout, new tools are needed to support reflection and emotional regulation in campus wellbeing spaces. This work investigates immersive large-screen visualizations for student mental health, focusing on designs that "mirror" a user's anxiety state and transition toward calmer representations over time. We developed two visualization conditions: a nature-based ocean wave visualization, where motion and brightness encode anxiety intensity, and a personified "face-blob" visualization, where color and facial expression represent anxiety levels. In a pilot study, five students self-reported anxiety using the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI), viewed anxiety-mapped visualizations in both conditions, and watched 10-minute transitions toward less-anxious states. We collected pre/post STAI responses and semi-structured interview data to evaluate perceived emotional impact, design preferences, and experiences of watching visual states shift. Our findings offer design insights into how immersive visualizations can represent anxiety as a mirrored, transitional state, and they provide practical guidance for future wellbeing-oriented display systems in campus environments.