Hi.
My name is Steven Baker.
And today, I'll be presenting our paper "School's Back--
Scaffolding Reminiscence in Social Virtual
Reality with Older Adults."
I'd like to begin by acknowledging the coauthors who
worked with me on the paper.
Now, a really important aspect of this work
is that the user study reported in our paper
was the culmination of a larger research project that
used participatory methods that placed our participants
and their views at the center of the research.
We worked with two separate groups of older adults who
were geographically separated by a distance of 150 kilometers,
and these groups met for the first time in the social VR
prototype that we used during the user study.
And we've described the earliest ventures of our project
in prior work.
The social VR prototype that was codesigned
with our participants was designed to foster reminisces
about their school experiences.
And our paper focuses on the reminiscence
scaffolding techniques that were designed for the prototype.
Now, as our time is very limited,
I'm going to show a short video that
demonstrates some of the prototype's characteristics.
The video provides some basic background on our participants.
It shows a participant choosing one
of their codesigned, embodied avatars
at the beginning of a social VR session.
It shows a group of four people transitioning
into the schoolroom environment where
the reminiscence took place.
And then it introduces three scaffolding features
that are central to our paper.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
That's a photo of me when I was probably three years of age.
And what did you think your career was going
to be when you were at school?
No.
Oh, OK.
My life for the last 50 or 60 years has been about teaching.
And in a large part, that came about because of one teacher
I had at two different schools.
[END PLAYBACK]
So I'd like to spend the rest of the presentation briefly
describing two of the scaffolding features that
are the focus of our paper, the ability
to introduce personal artifacts and the ability
to introduce holograms that we called "Avacasts."
So during the prototype development,
our participants brought personal artifacts
such as photographs, school books,
and other school-related paraphernalia
that they would like to share with others while they
reminisced about their school experiences.
Our team scanned these artifacts and gave each participant
the ability to generate and share
the artifact by pushing a button on the Oculus hand controller.
These artifacts played a key role
in forming relationships during the reminiscence sessions.
For example, when Holly generated
an artifact of a cooking book that was used in her economics
class, Chloe recognized that she had used the same book,
and this led to long conversations
about their shared experiences.
Our paper discusses how this scaffolding technique might
be enhanced by more robust 3D scanning techniques
and how these scaffolding features
can be key to unlocking autobiographical memories.
While there were 16 participants in our study,
only three could be copresent in each reminiscence session.
So we designed Avacasts to allow other participants represented
via their holograms to enter into the reminiscence sessions
and tell stories about their school experiences.
This in turn promoted conversations
among those present in the virtual environment.
This tool was especially useful in providing opportunities
for new perspectives without introducing more complexity
into the environment, something that our participants
told us was really important to them.
We discuss the importance of maintaining intimacy
during reminiscence and discuss how Avacasts provide a template
that other designers can adapt to introduce new voices
without increasing complexity.
And these are just two examples of the reminiscence scaffolding
techniques that are the focus of our paper.
We also examine how the virtual environment
itself acted as a scaffolding tool,
and we discuss how another scaffolding feature,
conversation starters, were used.
And we show how this feature prompted reminiscence
in different ways as the user study progressed.
With that, I'll end my presentation.
Thanks very much.