Understanding the Influence of Cultural Dimensions on the Interpretative Ability of People to Infer Personality from the Avatars: Evidence from Cultural Dimensions of Greece, Pakistan, Russia, and Singapore

Avatar is a customized cartoon representation of the self and many people develop inferences about individuals’ online representations through their avatar’s facial appearance. Research has shown that avatars can signal information about the personality and social desires of a person [1]. Nonetheless, customizing an avatar enables control of self-representation that could potentially moderate the true personality traits of an individual. The customized facial appearance of the avatar affects people’s ability to draw expressions [2], whereas, several cultural dimensions affect the interpretative ability of the people to construct personality inferences from the facial appearance of avatars. We found a significant relationship between neuroticism to uncertainty avoidance and masculinity, whereas, negative relationships were found between extraversion and masculinity, and agreeableness to uncertainty avoidance. The study uses three-dimensional avatars to capture detailed features and expressions on avatar faces

Book Review: The Asian Jesus

A review of The Asian Jesus by Michael Amaladoss

A Trip to the Moon: Personalized Animated Movies for Self-reflection

Self-tracking physiological and psychological data poses the challenge of presentation and interpretation. Insightful narratives for self-tracking data can motivate the user towards constructive self-reflection. One powerful form of narrative that engages audience across various culture and age groups is animated movies. We collected a week of self-reported mood and behavior data from each user and created in Unity a personalized animation based on their data. We evaluated the impact of their video in a randomized control trial with a non-personalized animated video as control. We found that personalized videos tend to be more emotionally engaging, encouraging greater and lengthier writing that indicated self-reflection about moods and behaviors, compared to non-personalized control videos

Avatar actors

In this text I wish to discuss, as well as illustrate through pictorial examples, how the Live Visuals of three dimensional online virtual worlds may be leading us into participatory and collaborative Play states during which we appear to become the creators as well as the actors of what may also be described as our own real-time cinematic output. One of the most compelling of these stages may be three dimensional, online virtual worlds in which avatars create and enact their own tales and conceptions, effectively bringing forth live, participatory cinema through Play

Indices for Virtual Service Agent Design: Cross-Cultural Evaluation

While localization helps to create websites and mobile apps for specific target markets, not as much attention was devoted to the area of affective virtual service agents. The situation is changing due to advances in affective computing and artificial intelligence. Virtual service agents have the potential to change the way how people interact with information technology by transforming control method from physical gestures to natural language conversation. By having human-like characteristics, the agents can transform impersonal service experience to personal and make an emotional impression on the user or customer. Such message can take different forms and interpretations, depending on national culture and other context. Qualitative data from interviews with experts were used to identify differences in how they are viewed in Sweden and Japan. A survey was then used to quantify the differences using a sample of participants, who were asked to rate the likability and trustworthiness of agents with varying ethnicity, gender and age. The impact of visible visual attributes on their trustworthiness and likability is analysed on a familiar example with virtual service agents at an airport. It was found that each group favours their familiar communication style and recommendations on virtual service agent localization are given

Playful and creative ICT pedagogical framing : A nursery school case study

This article reports on the findings of a one-year qualitative study in which a nursery school used information and communication technology (ICT) and a digital media consultant as a catalyst for cultural change leading to teachers’ improved pedagogical framing and children’s enhanced learning dispositions. The pedagogic framing included the children making mini-movies and avatars which were uploaded onto the nursery website. It is argued that such innovative and creative ICT pedagogy was strongly motivational and afforded opportunities for coconstruction and sustained shared thinking (SST) as it engaged with children’s and families’ digital cultural habitus. The research reports on field notes, interviews and observations (n ¼ 15) of child peer interactions and teacher child interactions

De-Roling from Experiences and Identities in Virtual Worlds

Within dramatherapy and psychodrama, the term ‘de-roling’ indicates a set of activities that assist the subjects of therapy in ‘disrobing’ themselves from their fictional characters. Starting from the psychological needs and the therapeutic goals that ‘de-roling’ techniques address in dramatherapy and psychodrama, this text provides a broader understanding of procedures and exercises that define and ease transitional experiences across cultural practices such as religious rituals and spatial design. After this introductory section, we propose a tentative answer as to why game studies and virtual world research largely ignored processes of ‘roling’ and ‘de-roling’ that separate the lived experience of role-play from our everyday sense of the self. The concluding sections argue that de-roling techniques are likely to become more relevant, both academically and in terms of their practical applications, with the growing diffusion of virtual technologies in social practices. The relationships we can establish with ourselves and with our surroundings in digital virtual worlds are, we argue, only partially comparable with similar occurrences in pre-digital practices of subjectification. We propose a perspective according to which the accessibility and immersive phenomenological richness of virtual reality technologies are likely to exacerbate the potentially dissociative effects of virtual reality applications. This text constitutes an initial step towards framing specific socio-technical concerns and starting a timely conversation that binds together dramatherapy, psychodrama, game studies, and the design of digital virtual worlds