Started

2016

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Ongoing

VR Empathy Game "Why Did Baba Yaga Take My Brother?"

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This research project is about using virtual reality technologies for developing empathy in young children. 

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Here is 3 minutes video about the VR Empathy Game.

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The Virtual Reality (VR) educational game “Why Did Baba Yaga Take My Brother?” aims to support empathy development and understanding of social interactions in young children. The game brings a player to the world of a fairy tale “The Magic Swan Geese” and encourages them to reflect on characters’ emotions through dialog with characters, watching character’s memories and perspectives. Use of VR for children’s games allows designers to create realistic immersive experiences, which can help a player to experience a stronger empathetic response. Innovative This VR Empathy Game creates a safe exploratory world of immersive and realistic empathy experiences for young children. The game is designed for children of 5 to 8 years old as a potential extracurricular activity at school or at home.

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If you want to playtest the game, here is the link to the game build. 

Just download this file to your Oculus Quest 2 device. You might want to use the SideQuest application to do so. 

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Shield:  Licence BY-NC-SA 4.0

This Game is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Drinks

Augmented Reality Mobile Empathy Game

This project aims to create and research an AR mobile empathy game for children using augmented reality technologies to solve a challenge to the mental distance created between virtual reality games and the real world. We have a research assumption that using AR games would help children benefit from interacting with the virtual characters while at the same time maintaining a connection with the real world. In addition, mobile AR technologies are more affordable for all socio-economic groups of people. Our goals for this project are to help children learn about other's feelings and perspectives using different empathy features (glasses, memories, dialog) and to provide players with an AR immersive adventure game experience, in which they will interact with the AR 3D characters in different realistic ways (dialog, hug, touch, giving a gift).

Healthy

Exploration of Empathy And Social Connectedness in Rural India

This project taps into the challenges that might occur while exploring inter-cultural empathy. It aims to explore the understanding and perception of social skills, empathy, and social connectedness of adults and adolescents living in rural India, collect insights into how social-emotional learning is incorporated and implemented in rural Indian schools, and validate local language versions of the Basic Empathy Scale (BES) and Social Connectedness Scale. Such knowledge will help us to deeper explore how to design gamified tools for empathy/social-emotional competencies assessment and development in more meaningful ways across different cultures. As a part of this project, we have worked with local children and performed multiple sessions on participatory design as well as role-play activities seeking design specifics and challenges related to this population. The first round of data collection was done in 2023. Data analysis and the second round of data collection are in progress.

Started

2016

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Ongoing

VR Empathy Game "Flip the Board"

This project aims to help children to learn to look at others’ feelings and situations from another perspective and to address conflicts constructively. This project builds interactions with the VR characters on the VR Empathy game features (glasses, memories, dialog), which had been initially developed in our prior project in 2017. This game invites a player to start by watching the simple story, which has some sort of conflict or debate between two characters. A player will be offered to pick the side of the conflict and explore the arguments of one side using empathy game features. (Or, alternatively, a player will be assigned the side of the conflict randomly). Then, a player will be asked to offer the solution for the unfolding conflict situation (potentially from the list of solutions or solution constructor). Once a solution has been made, BOOM! The “board will be flipped” (a metaphor from a chess game), and a player will instantly switch to the other side of the conflict. He/she will have to face the situation within the scope of a freshly made decision, but from another side. A player will be offered some time to explore how it feels to be on another side and familiarize themselves with alternative views of the conflicting situation (using VR Empathy Game features - memories, glasses, and dialog). After that experience, a player will be offered to find a solution to that conflict again. The player can choose to keep the same solution made before the board “flips"  or change and/or alter the solution.

Mains

Mobile Game "The Magic Swan Geese"

This research project explores how computer games can be developed to engage young children in critical discussions of cultural awareness and empathy in or out of classrooms. In order to answer the question “How can we expose children to different cultures and help them develop cultural awareness and empathy?” we are building a computer game for young children (5 to 7 years old) based on a Russian traditional fairy tale “The Magic Swan Geese.” As a framework for designing the game, we draw on research on computer game design, early childhood development, and fairy tales literature. Through creating a pilot game we will test the feasibility of translating the theory of the design framework for into practice. This paper presents the design framework, the design of the game, and data from this on-going research and development project.

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All the game elements and the game characters were made from clay. We used a claymation style to animate this game.

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Here is the video for the game introduction scene.

Healthy

VR Yoga Game

This project aims to help children learn proper yoga postures alignment as well as other yoga techniques such as breathing through visual, audial and tactile modalities of VR experience. The game presents the full yoga class for children, including warming up, performing yoga poses, doing some breathing techniques, and relaxation. For the player, the game will look like going on an adventure and solving the challenge of finding their missing VR brother. Each of the game steps will be aligned with the yoga class flow. For example, by hiding behind the tree from the geese, a player would need to perform a tree pose. The target audience of our game is expected to be children aged 6 years and older, regardless of any prior knowledge or training in yoga.