CounselAR: exploring how AR filters facilitate online psychotherapy In the wild with South Korean young adults

Conference item

In a society where mental health issues are prevalent, engagement with psychotherapy remains low due to stigma and accessibility barriers. Telepsychotherapy offers a potential solution but holds challenges, including difficulties in encouraging open self-disclosure and ease of access. In this paper, we introduce CounselAR, an augmented reality (AR)-mediated therapy service designed to facilitate one-on-one therapy sessions by allowing both client and therapist to use AR filters to maintain varying degrees of anonymity. Through a six-week field deployment involving nine clients and four therapists, we explored how AR-mediated therapy might support psychotherapy from both the clients’ and therapists’ perspectives. The results illustrate the potential role of AR filters in enhancing self-disclosure, building rapport, and lowering entry barriers to psychotherapy. Drawing on these findings, we discuss the nuanced role of AR filters and the implications of leveraging AR in psychotherapy

Authors: Noh, H; Chishti, SMK; Jo, H; Newhouse, NI; Kim, S

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Association for Computing
• Host title: CHI '25: Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• Article number: 713
• Publication date: 2025-04-25
• Acceptance date: 2025-03-04
• Event title: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2025)
• Event location: Yokohama, Japan
• Event website: https://chi2025.acm.org/
• Event start date: 2025-04-26
• Event end date: 2025-05-01
• DOI: 10.1145/3706598.3713387
• ISBN: 9798400713941
• Language: English
• Keywords: AR; psychotherapy; Field Deployment Study; HCI; mental health; young adults