Anonymous Panda: preserving anonymity and expressiveness in online mental health platforms

Digital solutions that allow people to seek treatment, such as online psychological interventions and other technology-mediated therapies, have been developed to assist individuals with mental health disorders. Such approaches may raise privacy concerns about the use of people’s data and the safety of their mental health information. This work uses cutting-edge computer graphics technology to develop a novel system capable of increasing anonymity while maintaining expressiveness in computer-mediated mental health interventions. According to our preliminary findings, we were able to customize a realistic avatar using Live Link, Metahumans, and Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) with the same emotional depth as a real person. Furthermore, these findings showed that the virtual avatars’ inability to express themselves through hand motion gave the impression that they were acting in an unnatural way. By including the hand tracking feature using the Leap Motion Controller, we were able to improve our comprehension of the prospective use of ultra-realistic virtual human avatars in video conferencing therapy, i.e., both studies helped us understand how vital facial and body expressions are and how problematic their absence is in communicating with others.Soluções digitais que permitem às pessoas procurar tratamento, tais como terapias psicológicas online e outras terapias com recurso à tecnologia, foram desenvolvidas para ajudar indivíduos com distúrbios de saúde mental. Tais abordagens podem suscitar preocupações sobre a privacidade na utilização dos dados das pessoas e a segurança da informação sobre a sua saúde mental. Este trabalho utiliza tecnologia de ponta em computação gráfica para desenvolver um sistema inovador capaz de aumentar o anonimato, mantendo simultaneamente a expressividade nas inter venções de saúde mental mediadas por computador. Segundo os nossos resultados preliminares, conseguimos personalizar um avatar realista usando Live Link, Metahumans, e Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) com a mesma profundidade emocional que uma pessoa real. Além disso, os resultados mostraram que a incapacidade dos avatares virtuais de se expressarem através do movimento das mãos deu a impressão de que estavam a agir de uma forma pouco natural. Ao incluir a função de rastreio das mãos utilizando o Leap Motion Controller, conseguimos melhorar a nossa compreensão do uso prospetivo de avatares humanos virtuais e ultrarrealistas na terapia de videoconferência, ou seja, os estudos realizados ajudaram-nos a compreender como as expressões faciais e corporais são vitais e como a sua ausência é problemática na comunicação com os outros

Conducting empirical research in virtual worlds: experiences from two projects in Second Life

At The Open University in the UK, we have conducted empirical qualitative research in Second Life, a virtual world. The first project is in the education domain in which we are investigating the designs of learning spaces in Second Life, while the second project is related to shopping and consumer behavior of users in Second Life. In this paper, we discuss our experiences of conducting empirical research in virtual worlds with a specific focus on the following aspects: ethical norms, real-world and virtual identities, privacy of the participants, communication modalities (voice, text and use of gestures), logistics of conducting user-based studies, and skills and training needs of researchers. Although our experiences are based on conducting empirical research in Second Life, we hope that our experiences and discussions in this paper will also be useful for researchers who aim to conduct research in avatar-based virtual worlds other than Second Life

The Metaverse evolution: Toward Future Digital Twin Campuses

The term 'Metaverse' has been used to refer to the next generation Internet (NextG). New, developing, and recently innovation technologies have enabled the incorporation of digital twins into education's metaverse. This is a shared virtual area that combines all virtual worlds over the Internet. This will enable users represented by digital avatars to interact and cooperate as if they were in the physical world. While the metaverse may seem futuristic, it is accelerating because of emerging technologies such as AI and Extended Reality. This paper explores the technologies utilised to build the metaverse and practical applications on improving the educational experience and offer value by optimising how students are taught. Thus, we shall study in detail eight enabling technologies that are important for the Metaverse ecosystem: Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality. Autonomy of Avatar, Computer Agent, and Digital Twin. Data Storage, Data sharing and Data interoperability. This article will discuss prospective metaverse technology and its difficulties. Finally, we have looked at societal acceptance, privacy, and security challenge

Attention and Social Cognition in Virtual Reality:The effect of engagement mode and character eye-gaze

Technical developments in virtual humans are manifest in modern character design. Specifically, eye gaze offers a significant aspect of such design. There is need to consider the contribution of participant control of engagement. In the current study, we manipulated participants’ engagement with an interactive virtual reality narrative called Coffee without Words. Participants sat over coffee opposite a character in a virtual café, where they waited for their bus to be repaired. We manipulated character eye-contact with the participant. For half the participants in each condition, the character made no eye-contact for the duration of the story. For the other half, the character responded to participant eye-gaze by making and holding eye contact in return. To explore how participant engagement interacted with this manipulation, half the participants in each condition were instructed to appraise their experience as an artefact (i.e., drawing attention to technical features), while the other half were introduced to the fictional character, the narrative, and the setting as though they were real. This study allowed us to explore the contributions of character features (interactivity through eye-gaze) and cognition (attention/engagement) to the participants’ perception of realism, feelings of presence, time duration, and the extent to which they engaged with the character and represented their mental states (Theory of Mind). Importantly it does so using a highly controlled yet ecologically valid virtual experience

The Metaverse: Survey, Trends, Novel Pipeline Ecosystem & Future Directions

The Metaverse offers a second world beyond reality, where boundaries are non-existent, and possibilities are endless through engagement and immersive experiences using the virtual reality (VR) technology. Many disciplines can benefit from the advancement of the Metaverse when accurately developed, including the fields of technology, gaming, education, art, and culture. Nevertheless, developing the Metaverse environment to its full potential is an ambiguous task that needs proper guidance and directions. Existing surveys on the Metaverse focus only on a specific aspect and discipline of the Metaverse and lack a holistic view of the entire process. To this end, a more holistic, multi-disciplinary, in-depth, and academic and industry-oriented review is required to provide a thorough study of the Metaverse development pipeline. To address these issues, we present in this survey a novel multi-layered pipeline ecosystem composed of (1) the Metaverse computing, networking, communications and hardware infrastructure, (2) environment digitization, and (3) user interactions. For every layer, we discuss the components that detail the steps of its development. Also, for each of these components, we examine the impact of a set of enabling technologies and empowering domains (e.g., Artificial Intelligence, Security & Privacy, Blockchain, Business, Ethics, and Social) on its advancement. In addition, we explain the importance of these technologies to support decentralization, interoperability, user experiences, interactions, and monetization. Our presented study highlights the existing challenges for each component, followed by research directions and potential solutions. To the best of our knowledge, this survey is the most comprehensive and allows users, scholars, and entrepreneurs to get an in-depth understanding of the Metaverse ecosystem to find their opportunities and potentials for contribution

Active games: an examination of user engagement to define design recommendations

Active gaming is a form of video gaming that requires full body motion or varying degrees of physical activity to play a game. While active gaming has gained momentum, there is a lack of studies that provide insight on how they should be designed, specifically components of active games make them engaging. This study identifies, analyzes and categorizes specific design mechanics and features used in active games. It answers the question: Which, if any, game mechanics and features can a panel of experts in academia, health and the game industry agree on as valuable and impactful to the construction of successful and engaging active games? Using a Delphi study, nine experts answered questions related to active gaming. They reached agreement on 20 of the 21 inquiries regarding game design focused on motivation, social influences and flow. Their feedback offers recommendations on the design of future active games, and identifies emerging trends. This study shares their notes, and translates the findings into specific recommendations for developers on the design of active games

Eliciting information from adults: quality, quantity, and their willingness to disclose to an avatar interviewer

Avatars—digital representations of humans—may be a useful tool in a wide range of areas, such as education, advertising, communication, and health. The overarching goal of the present research was to examine the use of avatars in the context of evidential and clinical interviewing, in the hope that this novel technology could facilitate adults’ memory performance and enhance their disclosure of sensitive information. The first specific aim was to examine the effectiveness of an avatar interviewer on adults’ accounts of a witnessed event. In this context, adults were interviewed by either a digital-human avatar or a human face-to-face using both free- and directed-recall questions. Some participants also received post-event misinformation that was presented by either the digital-human avatar or the human interviewer. In addition, I examined the impact of several individual differences, including participants’ level of autism and personality traits, and their perception of the avatar’s operation. Finally, I investigated the effectiveness of avatar interviewers with varying degrees of anthropomorphism on adults’ accounts. The second specific aim was to explore the potential for avatar professionals in the context of the disclosure of sensitive information. In the present thesis, I investigated the effects of two types of avatar interviewers: a more anthropomorphic, 2D cartoon-rendered digital-human avatar, and a less anthropomorphic, speech-wave avatar. The digital-human avatar resembled the appearance of the human interviewers who were also used in the present research, but the avatar’s movement was restricted to eye blinks and head tilts. The speech-wave avatar interviewer resembled Apple’s Siri. Both types of avatar were voiced and operated by a concealed human interviewer. The digital-human avatar’s lips moved in synchrony with the human’s speech; the speech-wave avatar moved up and down, also in synchrony with the human’s speech. The avatar was displayed on a computer monitor that was placed on a table directly in front of the participant. The interviews involving the human interviewer were conducted face-to-face. Overall, differences in participants’ memory performance was not detected when they were interviewed only once by either a digital-human avatar or a human interviewer. When participants were interviewed twice, on the other hand, participants who were interviewed by the human interviewer were more talkative and provided more correct details than did participants who were interviewed by the digital-human avatar, but their reports were also less accurate during free recall. Still, the digital-human avatar did not protect the participants from the adverse effects of misleading information. Finally, relative to an interview with the digital-human avatar, participants’ memory performance was enhanced when the speech- wave avatar interviewed them. In addition to these group-level results, participants with low conscientiousness and autism traits, or who perceived the digital-human avatar as computer- operated, were more accurate in their accounts during free recall when a digital-human avatar interviewed them. With respect to disclosure, overall, participants preferred to disclose information to a human professional face-to-face rather than to avatar professionals. When I compared the digital-human avatar to the speech-wave avatar, participants preferred to disclose more embarrassing information, particularly sex-related topics, and reported more coherent details about an embarrassing personal event to a speech-wave avatar. In terms of the avatar’s characteristics, participants indicated that they would be more comfortable disclosing embarrassing information to an avatar appearing as a female around 45- to 54-years of age. Collectively, my findings provide initial insight of the potential value and pitfalls of using avatars in evidential and clinical interviewing. In this day and age, humans may have adapted to technology, treating non-human interviewers in much the same way as they treat human interviewers. Still, there is a place for avatars in specific populations, and in the context of disclosing stigmatising experiences. The results of the present research have important implications for designing and using avatars that might aid humans in performing specific tasks in help-seeking settings

"Seeing the Faces Is So Important" -- Experiences From Online Team Meetings on Commercial Virtual Reality Platforms

During the Covid-19 pandemic, online meetings became common for daily teamwork in the home office. To understand the opportunities and challenges of meeting in virtual reality (VR) compared to video conferences, we conducted the weekly team meetings of our human-computer interaction research lab on five off-the-shelf online meeting platforms over four months. After each of the 12 meetings, we asked the participants (N = 32) to share their experiences, resulting in 200 completed online questionnaires. We evaluated the ratings of the overall meeting experience and conducted an exploratory factor analysis of the quantitative data to compare VR meetings and video calls in terms of meeting involvement and co-presence. In addition, a thematic analysis of the qualitative data revealed genuine insights covering five themes: spatial aspects, meeting atmosphere, expression of emotions, meeting productivity, and user needs. We reflect on our findings gained under authentic working conditions, derive lessons learned for running successful team meetings in VR supporting different kinds of meeting formats, and discuss the team's long-term platform choice.Comment: This article has been published at Frontiers in Virtual Reality, Research Topic "Everyday Virtual and Augmented Reality: Methods and Applications, Volume II": https://doi.org/10.3389/frvir.2022.94579

Online Communication and Body Language

  Objectives: This article approaches the problem of body language, in the new context of online communication, trying to see how the latest development of technology influences it. Prior Work: The interest in body language has grown in the last decades, first because of the work of scientists like Ekman, who studied micro-gestures and tried to give a universal decoder, and second because of the latest technological evolution in communication, that has stressed the importance of non-verbal cues. Approach: Using observation and the latest writing in the field, we will explain the consequences that the use of avatars and online communication have on body language and its interpretation. Results: Excluding context, posture, micro-gestures, tone and so on, online communication does not only become stereotype, but also affects real communication and especially body language. We can observe pragmatism of gestures, standardizations, lack of customizations, inability to read other’s body language, etc. Implications: All of this shapes the Y-Generation, one that not only fails to interpret other’s body language, but also is unable to express themselves in direct communication. Value: This paper stresses out not only the consequences of online communication, but also the importance of further technological development.&nbsp