Morality in Tele-immersive Environments

ABSTRACT Humans are spending an increasing amount of time in teleimmersive environments interacting with avatars or virtual human bodies. Additionally, human behavior and cognition are affected by experiences in tele-immersive environments. Although there is substantial psychological work surrounding the notion of morality, there is little work that examines the interplay of immersive digital environments and the moral identity of the digital medium user. We conducted a study to explore how participants' moral behaviors and self-ratings of morality changed after immersion in either a moral or immoral tele-immersive environment. Results revealed that participants who witnessed the immoral scenarios felt and acted more immoral than participants in the moral scenario condition. These findings have important implications for understanding the effects of digital media as well as for the study of the psychological construct of moral identity

Facial expression analysis for predicting unsafe driving behavior

Abstract-Pervasive computing provides an ideal framework for active driver support systems in that context-aware systems are embedded in the car to support an ongoing human task. In the current study, we investigate how and with what success tracking driver facial features can add to the predictive accuracy of driver assistance systems. Using web cameras and a driving simulator, we captured facial expressions and driving behaviors of 49 participants while they drove a scripted 40 minute course. We extracted key facial features of the drivers using a facial recognition software library and trained machine learning classifiers on the movements of these facial features and the outputs from the car. We identified key facial features associated with driving accidents and evaluated their predictive accuracy at varying pre-accident intervals, uncovering important temporal trends. We also discuss implications for real life driver assistance systems

Immersive Virtual Reality Field Trips Facilitate Learning About Climate Change

Across four studies, two controlled lab experiments and two field studies, we tested the efficacy of immersive Virtual Reality (VR) as an education medium for teaching the consequences of climate change, particularly ocean acidification. Over 270 participants from four different learning settings experienced an immersive underwater world designed to show the process and effects of rising sea water acidity. In all of our investigations, after experiencing immersive VR people demonstrated knowledge gains or inquisitiveness about climate science and in some cases, displayed more positive attitudes toward the environment after comparing pre- and post-test assessments. The analyses also revealed a potential post-hoc mechanism for the learning effects, as the more that people explored the spatial learning environment, the more they demonstrated a change in knowledge about ocean acidification. This work is unique by showing distinct learning gains or an interest in learning across a variety of participants (high school, college students, adults), measures (learning gain scores, tracking data about movement in the virtual world, qualitative responses from classroom teachers), and content (multiple versions varying in length and content about climate change were tested). Our findings explicate the opportunity to use immersive VR for environmental education and to drive information-seeking about important social issues such as climate change

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Conversational Argument Strength and Burden of Proo

Simulator Sickness, and Transformed Social Interaction in Collaborative Virtual Environments

Longitudinal CVE Research 2 Empirical research on human behavior in collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) is in its infancy. Historically, one of the more valuable tools social scientists have used to evaluate new forms of media is longitudinal studies that examine user behavior over an extended period of time. In the current study, three triads of participants came to the lab for 15 sessions over a ten week period to collaborate for approximately 45 minutes per session. We examined nonverbal behavior, task performance on verbal tasks, and subjective ratings of presence, copresence, simulator sickness, and entitativity over time. Furthermore, we examined two types of transformed social interaction: nonverbal mimicry and facial similarity. Results demonstrated substantial differences in task performance, subjective ratings, nonverbal behavior, and simulator sickness over time as participants became familiar with the system. Furthermore, transforming avatar appearance to increase facial similarity sometimes improved task performance. We discuss implications for research on CVEs

Claim Strength and Burden of Proof in Interactive Arguments

Previous research shows an anti-primacy effect (Bailenson & Rips, 1996), in that the first speaker in a conversational argument incurs more Burden of Proof (BOP) than the second speaker. In addition, claims may be encoded differently when they are embedded in a structured dialogue than when processed outside the context of the argument. We were interested in determining how the strength of specific claims in the argument depend on their location in the structure as a whole, and whether anti-primacy would persist in disputes where the claims offered by the two speakers were equally convincing. Subjects read interactive arguments between two speakers having a conversation, rated the convincingness and support levels of the individual claims when they were both embedded in the dialogue and removed from the dialogue, and judged overall burden of proof. Different groups of subjects saw the same arguments, the only difference being which speaker (first or second) made the particular groups of claims. The antiprimacy effect occurred even though the strength of the claims did not change as a function of which speaker presented them. In addition there was no difference between convincingness and support ratings, although the results demonstrated that the level of both types of ratings was somewhat a function of where in the argument structure the claims were situated. Specifically subjects perceived claims occurring in the initial position in the dialogue as less convincing than the same claims when the claims were removed from the context of the argument. furthermore, these initial claims correlated less with BOP than did the later claims

Using Virtual Heads for Person Identification: An Empirical Study Comparing Photographs to Photogrammetrically-Generated Models

The purpose of these studies was to examine the effectiveness of virtual heads: three-dimensional models of human heads and faces. Our goal is to use these virtual head models as functional substitutes for photographs of humans as well as for live humans during eyewitness lineups and other processes relating to person identification. We tested the effectiveness of virtual heads by taking photographs of people and then using 3dMeNow software by bioVirtual to build 3D models that resembled the photographs. We tested to see how easily experimental subjects would recognize images of the 3D models (compared to photographs) after being trained on short video clips of people. The goal of this study was to examine subjects' recognition of virtual faces and to compare this performance to recognition of real faces (i.e., Troje & Bueltoff, 1996). In the following sections we discuss relevant previous research, present the methods and results of the current study, and finally point to directions f..