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VICTEC Virtual ICT with Empathic Characters

VICTEC Virtual ICT with Empathic Characters. Sibylle Enz Universität Bamberg 1st PROLEARN TWS 2004 4/5 November 2004. Content. VICTEC: A new Approach for Anti-Bullying-Education What is VICTEC? The Bullying Problem The VICTEC Application: FearNot! Empathy and its Role in FearNot!

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VICTEC Virtual ICT with Empathic Characters

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  1. VICTECVirtual ICT with Empathic Characters Sibylle Enz Universität Bamberg 1st PROLEARN TWS 2004 4/5 November 2004

  2. Content • VICTEC: A new Approach for Anti-Bullying-Education • What is VICTEC? • The Bullying Problem • The VICTEC Application: FearNot! • Empathy and its Role in FearNot! • Empathy and Believability • Expressive Behaviour and Creating Empathy • Evaluation

  3. 1.1 What is VICTEC? • EU Framework V project Virtual ICT with Empathic Characters • 5 partners from UK, Portugal, Germany • Goal: applying virtual drama and 3D-graphically embodied characters to PSE (bullying) • Innovative: individual rather than collective

  4. The Partners • Centre for Virtual Environments, University of Salford (UK) • University of Hertfordshire (UK) • Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores (INESC-ID) (Portugal) • Autor, Tecnologias Multimédia S.A. (Portugal) • Institute of Theoretical Psychology, University of Bamberg (Germany)

  5. 1.2 The Bullying Problem • Repeated negative action that occurs regularly over time with the intention to hurt; imbalance of power between pupils (Olweus, 1999) • Main types of bullying behaviour: • direct/physical (punching, kicking, …) • direct/verbal (nasty name calling) • relational (social exclusion, rumour spreading) • Bullying roles: bully, victim, bully-victim, bystander • No clear educational message  knowledge about social interaction, coping strategies, etc. needed

  6. 1.3 The VICTEC Application: FearNot! • Fun with Empathic Agents to Reach Novel Outcomes in Teaching • Virtual theatre application aimed at anti-bullying education for 8-12 age group Bullying episode Interaction in library

  7. Q A I 1 2 3 F COPE COPE 1.3 The VICTEC Application: FearNot! • Introduction (I): characters and school • Bullying episode (1-3) • In between episodes: interaction with victim character in resource room (coping) • Educational message (F): after end of episode 3 • Questionnaires on empathy and theory of mind (QA)

  8. 2 Empathy and it’s Role in FearNot! • Empathy: ”any process where the attended perception of the object’s state generates a state in the subject that is more applicable to the object’s state or situation than to the subject’s own prior state or situation” (Preston and de Waal, 2002) • Cognitive: understanding perceived object’s inner state • Affective: feeling something due to perceived object’s inner state • Mediation of empathic processes via situation and/or expression

  9. 2 Empathy and it’s Role in FearNot! • Importance of user engagement to reach the educational goal • Via empathic relation between user and agent • By empathising with the victim, the user acts as invisible friend during the interaction phases in between the bullying episodes • User is not present in the episodes • Advice and support rather than god-like power to solve the problem • Empathy is promoted by believability of situation and agent expression

  10. 3 Empathy and Believability • Believability: Extent to which a human is willing to suspend their disbelieve in a collection of graphical pixels and to see it as an autonomous entity with its own internal life (Bates, 1994) • Believability via emotional expression: gesture, posture, facial expression, tone of voice • Interpreted by others as signalling an inner (affective) state  communication mechanism (understanding goals and motives of others) • Precondition for empathic processes between user and agent

  11. 4 Expressive Behaviour and Creating Empathy Believability through naturalism? • Dramatic approach: animated film & theatre • “Uncanny valley”: behaviour can not meet the high user expectations generated by naturalistic appearance • Cartoon-like FearNot! characters

  12. 4 Expressive Behaviour and Creating Empathy • Facial expressions • Stereotyped expressions instead of nodes on the facial mesh • Triggered by the internal emotional system of the agent

  13. 4 Expressive Behaviour and Creating Empathy • Posture • Exaggerated posture indicates confident, happy, sad, etc. mood • Voice • Very difficult to solve with unscripted dramas • Voices constructed from pre-recorded human input: large real-time data base in conflict with 3D real time rendering system

  14. 4 Expressive Behaviour and Creating Empathy • Realisation of expression in FearNot! • Unscripted drama: action (expressive behaviour) is generated by interaction between agents • Agent reacts to an event/object following appraisal rules (Ortony, Clore & Collins, 1988) immediate reactions and goals • Influence of memory and personality (bullying types) • Emotional expression is triggered by a rather sophisticated emotional model  coherent behaviour and empathy towards the agent

  15. 5 Evaluation –Main Research Questions • Does the software meet the technical and usability requirements? • Does the interaction with FearNot affect children’s (views on) bullying behaviour? • Can FearNot! help to improve the empathic abilities of the child users? • Do children actually develop empathy towards the characters in the scenarios?

  16. 5 Evaluation - Design • Large-scale evaluation event in June 2004 involving 400 children from Hertfordshire, UK • Pre-/Post-Tests in UK/P/D involving 100 children each • Iterative usability evaluation during the development of FearNot

  17. 5 Evaluation –Preliminary Results • Goal: evaluation of • Character attributes (believability, appearance, movement) • Storyline believability • Empathic feelings created between the child user and the animated characters

  18. 5 Evaluation – Preliminary Results UK/P sample N=127 Aged 8-13 (M=9.83; SD=1.04) 64♂ & 63♀ 1= positive response 5= negativeresponse

  19. 5 Evaluation – Preliminary Results UK/P sample • Character movements rated rather poorly • School environment and match with characters rated more highly • Empathy: majority felt sad for victim and angry for bully • Gender issues: boys empathise more with males than females while girls empathise with both genders

  20. Further information on the project… • Ruth Aylett (project coordinator) r.s.aylett@salford.ac.uk • Sibylle Enz, Carsten Zoll, Harald Schaub {sibylle.enz;carsten.zoll;harald.schaub} @ppp.uni-bamberg.de • The Project Website www.victec.org

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