“Heightened Empathy: A Multi-user Interactive Experience in a Bioresponsive Virtual Reality” by Armstrong, Skiers, Peng, Selvan Gunasekaran, Kundu, et al. …

  • ©Mark Armstrong, Kinga Skiers, Danyang Peng, Tamil Selvan Gunasekaran, Anish Kundu, Tanner Person, Yixin Wang, Kouta Minamizawa, and Yun Suen Pai

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Entry Number: 09

Title:


    Heightened Empathy: A Multi-user Interactive Experience in a Bioresponsive Virtual Reality

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Description:


    We present Heightened Empathy, a multi-user interactive experience in bioresponsive virtual reality (VR) designed to visualize emotional states and stimulate different types of empathy between two players in various interactive modes. The experience immerses users in a VR representation of each other’s emotional state, while also reflecting this to the audience using a table-top social robot and projection as they interact with each other. In competitive mode, the goal is to promote cognitive empathy where each user needs to understand the new emotional representation in VR to win. In communication mode, we have users act on one another verbally to promote emotional empathy. The experience aims to enhance empathy perception by placing the players in virtual environments that require them to understand, share, and act on each other’s perspectives and emotions.

References:


    1. Daniel Goleman, Annie McKee, Adam Waytz, 2017. Empathy (HBR emotional intelligence series). Harvard Business Press.
    2. Kunal Gupta, Jovana Lazarevic, Yun Suen Pai, and Mark Billinghurst. 2020. AffectivelyVR: Towards VR Personalized Emotion Recognition. In Proceedings of the 26th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (Virtual Event, Canada) (VRST ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 36, 3 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3385956.3422122
    3. Fannie Liu. 2020. Fostering Social Connection through Expressive Biosignals. Ph. D. Dissertation. Microsoft Research.
    4. Kinga Skiers, Yun Suen Pai, and Kouta Minamizawa. 2022. Transcendental Avatar: Experiencing Bioresponsive Avatar of the Self for Improved Cognition. In SIGGRAPH Asia 2022 XR (Daegu, Republic of Korea) (SA ’22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 13, 2 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3550472.3558417

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©Mark Armstrong, Kinga Skiers, Danyang Peng, Tamil Selvan Gunasekaran, Anish Kundu, Tanner Person, Yixin Wang, Kouta Minamizawa, and Yun Suen Pai

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