VR-Based Creative Interventions for Vulnerable Populations: A Scoping Review and HCI Design Framework

Virtual Reality (VR) is increasingly used in clinical, educational, and supportive-care contexts, but evidence on VR-based creative interventions for vulnerable populations remains fragmented. This article presents a scoping review and proposes VR-CREAT (Virtual Reality for Creative Resilience, Expression, and Social Integration) as an HCI-oriented conceptual framework for future design and evaluation. The review maps empirical and design-oriented literature on immersive VR, creative engagement, emotional resilience, and social connectedness, distinguishing direct creative-VR evidence from partial clinical, adjacent creative, and contextual sources. The evidence suggests that creative VR may support engagement, perceived agency, emotional expression, and social connectedness, but direct clinical evidence remains limited and preliminary. VR-CREAT translates the mapped evidence into candidate mechanisms, design requirements, testable propositions, and evaluation domains for future prototyping, usability testing, and controlled studies. The framework should therefore be understood as an unvalidated design and evaluation model, not as evidence of clinical effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, or readiness for large-scale implementation.