Beyond cute: exploring user types and design opportunities of virtual reality pet games

Virtual pet games, such as handheld games like Tamagotchi or video games like Petz, provide players with artificial pet companions or entertaining pet-raising simulations. Prior research has found that virtual pets have the potential to promote learning, collaboration, and empathy among users. While virtual reality (VR) has become an increasingly popular game medium, litle is known about users' expectations regarding game avatars, gameplay, and environments for VR-enabled pet games. We surveyed 780 respondents in an online survey and interviewed 30 participants to understand users' motivation, preferences, and game behavior in pet games played on various medium, and their expectations for VR pet games. Based on our findings, we generated three user types that reflect users' preferences and gameplay styles in VR pet games. We use these types to highlight key design opportunities and recommendations for VR pet games

Immersive Technologies in Virtual Companions: A Systematic Literature Review

The emergence of virtual companions is transforming the evolution of intelligent systems that effortlessly cater to the unique requirements of users. These advanced systems not only take into account the user present capabilities, preferences, and needs but also possess the capability to adapt dynamically to changes in the environment, as well as fluctuations in the users emotional state or behavior. A virtual companion is an intelligent software or application that offers support, assistance, and companionship across various aspects of users lives. Various enabling technologies are involved in building virtual companion, among these, Augmented Reality (AR), and Virtual Reality (VR) are emerging as transformative tools. While their potential for use in virtual companions or digital assistants is promising, their applications in these domains remain relatively unexplored. To address this gap, a systematic review was conducted to investigate the applications of VR, AR, and MR immersive technologies in the development of virtual companions. A comprehensive search across PubMed, Scopus, and Google Scholar yielded 28 relevant articles out of a pool of 644. The review revealed that immersive technologies, particularly VR and AR, play a significant role in creating digital assistants, offering a wide range of applications that brings various facilities in the individuals life in areas such as addressing social isolation, enhancing cognitive abilities and dementia care, facilitating education, and more. Additionally, AR and MR hold potential for enhancing Quality of life (QoL) within the context of virtual companion technology. The findings of this review provide a valuable foundation for further research in this evolving field

Familiars: representing Facebook users’ social behaviour through a reflective playful experience

In this paper, we describe the design and development of a social game called Familiars. Inspired by the daemons in Pullman’s “Dark Material” trilogy, Familiars are animal companions that sit on your Facebook profile and change into different animal forms based on your social activity within the social network of Facebook. . Familiars takes advantage of the powerful capabilities of the developers platform of Facebook to build a multi-dimensional picture of a player’s state based on social activity, facial expression analysis on photographs and suggestions from friends. This rich information is then distilled and presented to the player in the form of animal that the familiar chooses to take. We show how the types of animals and personalities were associated in a cross-cultural user study, and present quantitative results from the social behaviours of the players within the game in addition to qualitative data gathered from questionnaire responses

Implementation of Augmented Reality for Introduction To Android Based Mammalian Animals Using The Marker Based Tracking Method

Augmented Reality is a technology on 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional virtual objects that are combined into the real environment that is around us. With the ability of Augmented Reality that is able to change the atmosphere of children’s learning that can be used as a medium of learning in the introduction of mammals for kindergarten children. This AR can provide interesting facilities such as displaying 3-dimensional objects of these mammals along with animal sounds and animations using Smartphones, so that children can interact and be more creative in recognizing these mammals, because children experience their golden age at the age of 4 to 7 years which is a time when children begin to receive stimuli, so that children will be faster to receive and catch on learning from the introduction of these mammals by using Augmented Reality Technology. The results of testing on the Vuforia plugin and making the AR application on Unity can provide a good information result, where the use of AR can bring up mammalian objects by pointing the Smartphone at the marker, so that all mammals can be recognized properly. This shows that children’s interest around 85% in terms of UI/UX appearance, and 70% of children have no problems in running the Mammal Animal AR applicatio

Artificial Companions in Stroke Rehabilitation: Likeability, Familiarity and Expectations

There is a growing interest in digital companionship and artificial companions (ACs) as they are introduced in rehabilitation and healthcare services for the elderly and people with disabilities. We conduct an exploratory, pre-adoption study to better understand first impressions and likeability of ACs with older individuals in a stroke rehabilitation context. We interviewed 11 participants with stroke-related impairments as they viewed depictions of ACs and engaged in interactive gameplay. We found two main axes in which participants judge ACs’ likeability: familiarity and expectations, where more familiarity and having expectations were associated with likeability. We relate these findings to literature on ACs for health promotion for survivors of stroke and discuss implications for the design of ACs

Robots, drugs, reality and education: how the future will change how we think

Emerging technologies for learning report - Article exploring various future trends and their potential impact on educatio

Nature-Based Therapy: Its Potential as a Complementary Approach to Treating Communication Disorders

Nature-based therapy (NBT) has been incorporated into the practice of many medical and mental health professions. Occupational therapists, physical therapists, nurses, social workers, psychologists, and to a lesser extent, speech-language pathologists have used NBT practices as a complementary means of treating a variety of physical, emotional, and cognitive disorders. This article includes a description of NBT and the three types that comprise the practice and a review of the literature demonstrating the use of NBT in the general population and, more specifically, with individuals with neurogenic communication disorders. It concludes with a discussion of directions for future research of NBT

Cognitive impacts of social virtual reality: disentangling the virtual mere presence and audience effect

Researchers have investigated the impacts of social co-presence on the individual’s performance for over a century, finding that performance changes in a social setting when contrasted to performing alone – termed the social facilitation effect (SFE). Driven by the demand for realistic remote interaction, social technologies are currently aspiring to elicit a meaningful state of virtual co-presence. However, the virtual-SFE literature is currently inconclusive, especially when contrasting the AI versus human-driven SFE-impact. This thesis argues that current virtual-SFE findings can be elucidated by investigating SFE through its mechanisms: the feeling of being observed (audience effect: AE) and the sense of co-presence with another person (mere presence effect: MPE). The three experiments tested whether AE and MPE impact participants cognitive performance differently, depending on whether the companion is human-minded or AI-driven, during either remote videoconference or lab-based immersive virtual interaction. AE was predicted to be susceptible to human-minded companion impact, the MPE to be susceptible to the visual co-presence of any humanoid companion. Videoconference-based experiment one and two demonstrated that videoconference MPE and AE were facilitatory: MPE driven by the participants self-visual presence, not companion-visual presence and AE driven by human-minded companion as predicted. The immersive in-lab experiment three found MPE and AE were inhibitory: humanoid companion presence drove the MPE, and AE was irrespective of companion mind property. Overall, the findings supported the predictions that MPE and AE can be aroused independently by changing participants beliefs about their social-companion and their observed virtual co-presence, explaining some trends in current virtual-SFE literature. However, future studies should be mindful of virtual platform affordances, participants self-presence, and real-world testing-environment when testing and interpreting results. The sufficient level of virtual co-immersion and self-visual presence is required for virtual-SFE. Hopefully this research will pave the way towards greater understanding of virtual cognition and development of wellbeing-focused virtual-platforms

The Social and Behavioral Influences of Interactions with Virtual Dogs as Embodied Agents in Augmented and Virtual Reality

Intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) have been researched for years and recently many of these IVAs have become commercialized and widely used by many individuals as intelligent personal assistants. The majority of these IVAs are anthropomorphic, and many are developed to resemble real humans entirely. However, real humans do not interact only with other humans in the real world, and many benefit from interactions with non-human entities. A prime example is human interactions with animals, such as dogs. Humans and dogs share a historical bond that goes back thousands of years. In the past 30 years, there has been a great deal of research to understand the effects of human-dog interaction, with research findings pointing towards the physical, mental, and social benefits to humans when interacting with dogs. However, limitations such as allergies, stress on dogs, and hygiene issues restrict some needy individuals from receiving such benefits. More recently, advances in augmented and virtual reality technology provide opportunities for realizing virtual dogs and animals, allowing for their three-dimensional presence in the users\u27 real physical environment or while users are immersed in virtual worlds. In this dissertation, I utilize the findings from human-dog interaction research and conduct a systematic literature review on embodied IVAs to define a research scope to understand virtual dogs\u27 social and behavioral influences in augmented and virtual reality. I present the findings of this systematic literature review that informed the creation of the research scope and four human-subjects studies. Through these user studies, I found that virtual dogs bring about a sense of comfort and companionship for users in different contexts. In addition, their responsiveness plays an important role in enhancing users\u27 quality of experience, and they can be effectively utilized as attention guidance mechanisms and social priming stimuli