From Prompt to Presence: Co-Creating Personalised Emotional Sanctuaries in VR with Generative AI

The emergence of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), combined with immersive virtual reality (VR), enables the rapid creation of personalised virtual content from simple text prompts, holding potential for emotional support. However, most current VR systems rely on pre-authored content and limit user agency in designing emotionally meaningful experiences. We introduce OasisMind, an AI-assisted VR system that empowers users to co-create 360° environments, corresponding ambient soundscapes, and context-aware digital companions through natural language prompts. In a user study (N=24), we observed how participants constructed virtual worlds for emotionally meaningful use cases and compared their creations to validated, pre-defined VR scenes recommended by previous research. Our results indicate a subjective preference for self-created environments, while no significant differences were observed in perceived satisfaction or presence between conditions. These findings suggest that user agency contributes to the emotional resonance of virtual experiences and inform the design of future personalised companion systems.