Hi, my name is Steven Baker and today, I will be presenting our paper
"Avatar-Mediated Communication in Social VR:
An In-depth Exploration of Older Adult Interaction in an Emerging Communication Platform".
Our paper reports on the final stage of a three-year research project
that explored how social VR might be used to support the needs of older adults.
The project used Participatory Action Research as its overarching methodology,
and this meant partnering closely with our participants on all aspects of the work.
This extended to inviting participants' to take part in reporting on the research findings, and we
are proud of the fact that two of the co-authors on this paper were participants in our project.
We report on a five-month user study that involved 16 older adults between the ages of 70 and 81.
During the user study, the participants met in a social VR environment that was co-designed with
the group in earlier stages of the project. This co-design work has been detailed in prior work.
The social VR environment consisted of a school room where participants could meet
in groups of three, plus a facilitator (myself) to reminisce about their school experiences.
Participants were located at either a regional or metropolitan site during the user study
which were separated by a distance of 150 kilometres or 93 miles.
Participants from the two sites were meeting for the first time in the social VR environment.
As part of the participatory design process, the older adults created
their own avatars which they could choose to embody during the user study sessions.
One was based on a realistic depiction of how they looked,
and the other was a free-form design that we referred to as their 'cartoon' avatar.
During the participatory design work that preceded the user study,
participants also brought in physical artefacts, such as school books and photographs,
that were digitised and turned into 3D objects which they could generate
and pass around in the social VR sessions to promote conversation.
We conducted 26 social VR sessions during the user study, with each lasting an average of 44 minutes.
The study sought to respond to the research question _How can older adult experiences
of avatar-mediated communication in social VR
inform the design of future systems aimed at older users?_
A combination of video, survey and interview data was collected and analysed during the user study,
and from this, we report on four major themes that respond to the research question. In our
discussion section, we reflect on these themes and contribute six design reflections that
further explore the potential for social VR to meet the communication needs of older users.
While I do not have time in this video to look extensively at these results,
I do want to speak to some of the overarching themes explored in the work.
I look forward to discussing other aspects of the paper in the Q&A.
One of the subjects explored in our paper relates to how the experience of embodying their avatars
in social VR opened up the potential for the older users to communicate in less inhibited ways.
For example, several introverted participants said they felt more empowered to speak
in group situations when embodied as an avatar. We also discovered that participants
felt more comfortable discussing personal, often traumatising, stories from early in their lives
while embodied as an avatar. They described feeling their avatar provided a layer of
protection that would not exist if they were telling such stories face-to-face.
Participants also described feeling that the adaptability of avatars appearance
provided the potential for a new range of tailored communication experiences. For example, Bernard,
who had recently celebrated his 50th wedding anniversary, spoke about how he would have
liked to have been able to embody an avatar that showed what he and his wife had looked like on
their wedding day. We draw on these results in our design reflections to contribute a design
concept for an intergenerational communication app that would allow grandparents and grandchildren
to share a bedtime story while embodying the characters from the book in social VR.
While these results speak to the potential benefits of social VR for older users, our work
also highlights some of the challenges that will need to be addressed for it to meet their needs.
One such challenge relates to the issue of facilitating emotional expression via avatars
in social VR. Our final design reflection identifies some of the attributes we
believe will need to be addressed by future systems if this challenge is to be addressed.
We conclude our paper by arguing, based on our long-term engagement with our participants,
for older adults to play a greater role in evaluating the design of emerging technologies.
As Len, one of our participants put it, older adults are coming from a different point of
discovery, and we believe that much can be learned by inviting older users into the design process.
Thank you for watching this presentation and
I look forward to discussing the project further in the Q&A.