scholarly journals The Paradox of Interactive Media: The Potential for Video Games and Virtual Reality as Tools for Violence Prevention

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas David Bowman ◽  
Sun Joo Ahn ◽  
Laura M. Mercer Kollar
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Video Games ◽  
Real World ◽  
Interpersonal Violence ◽  
Interactive Media ◽  
Media Violence ◽  
Media Content ◽  
Research Perspectives ◽  
And Behaviors ◽  
The Impact

Interactive media such as video games and virtual reality (VR) provide users with lived experiences that may be dangerous or even impossible in daily life. By providing interactive experiences in highly authentic, detail-rich contexts, these technologies have demonstrated measurable success in impacting how people think, feel, and behave in the physical world. At the same time, violent interactive media content has been historically connected with a range of antisocial effects in both popular press and academic research. Extant literature has established a small-but-statistically significant effect of interactive media violence on aggressive thoughts and behaviors, which could serve as a risk factor for interpersonal violence. However, left unexplored is the seemingly paradoxical claim that under some conditions, interactive media experiences might protect against interpersonal violence. Drawing on advances in media theory and research and the evolution of interactive media content and production practices, the current manuscript suggests ways in which interactive media violence may be leveraged to lower the likelihood of real-world violence experiences. For example, research on both violent and non-violent games has found that players can (a) express guilt after committing violent acts, (b) report reflective and introspective emotional reactions during gameplay, and (c) debate the morality of their actions with others. Regarding VR, studies have demonstrated that (a) witnessing physical violence in immersive spaces led participants to take the perspective of victims and better understand their emotional state and (b) controlled exposure to traumatic or violent events can be used for treatment. Broadly, studies into video games and VR demonstrate that the impact of actions in virtual worlds transfer into the physical worlds to influence (later) attitudes and behaviors. Thus, how these experiences may be potentially harnessed for social change is a compelling and open consideration, as are side-effects of such interventions on vulnerable groups. The current manuscript summarizes emerging research perspectives (as well as their limitations) to offer insight into the potential for interactive media violence to protect against real-world violence victimization and perpetration.

Reducing Outgroup Bias through Intergroup Contact with Non-Playable Video Game Characters in VR

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 257-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
Priska Breves
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Black People ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
Racially Diverse ◽  
Virtual Reality Technology ◽  
Explicit Bias ◽  
Research Gap ◽  
The Impact

Video games are one of the most popular media forms in today's society, but are often criticized for various reasons. For instance, mainstream video games do not incorporate enough racially diverse game characters or are often connected to adolescents’ levels of aggression and have thus been the focus of many debates. While the negative consequences of video games have been analyzed by many academic studies, research on the prosocial effects of video games is scarce. To address this research gap and support the ongoing call for more diverse video game characters, this study used a 3 × 1 between-subjects design ( N = 86) to test the impact of racially diverse non-playable characters (NPCs). The parasocial contact hypothesis was used as the theoretical foundation, incorporating virtual reality technology as an intensifier of effects. The results showed that helping a Black NPC did not reduce implicit bias, but reduced explicit bias towards Black people. This improvement was stronger when the video game was played using virtual reality technology than when using a traditional two-dimensional gaming device.

scholarly journals Virtual Reality and Situated Experiential Education A conceptualisation and exploratory trial

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Schott ◽  
Stephen Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Virtual Environment ◽  
Learning Environments ◽  
Experiential Education ◽  
Real World ◽  
Virtual Space ◽  
Immersive Environments ◽  
Education Environment ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Large Groups

<p>Virtual reality is widely recognised as offering the potential for fully immersive environments. This paper describes a framework that guides the creation and analysis of immersive environments that are pedagogically structured to support situated and experiential education. The “situated experiential education environment” framework described in this paper is used to examine the impact that a virtual environment can have on the user experience of participants in a virtual space. The analysis of a virtual environment implemented to support learner exploration of issues of tourism development and the related impacts suggests that this type of experience is capable of providing participants with a holistic experience of real world environments that are otherwise too expensive, impractical or unethical for large groups of people to visit in person. The pedagogical value of such experiences is enabled through immersion in a reality-based environment, engagement with complex and ambiguous situations and information, and interaction with the space, other students and teachers. The results demonstrate that complex immersive learning environments are readily achievable but that high levels of interactivity remains a challenge.</p>

scholarly journals The impact of virtual reality (functional and structural constraints) and real world training on the self-efficacy of dart throwing

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-57
Author(s):  
سید احمد موسوی ◽  
شهبازی مهدی ◽  
الهه عرب عامری ◽  
الهام شیرزاد عراقی
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Real World ◽  
Self Efficacy ◽  
The Self ◽  
Structural Constraints ◽  
Dart Throwing ◽  
The Impact

scholarly journals Impact Sound Generation for Audiovisual Interaction with Real-World Movable Objects in Building-Scale Virtual Reality

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (16) ◽  
pp. 7546
Author(s):  
Katashi Nagao ◽  
Kaho Kumon ◽  
Kodai Hattori
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Real World ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Virtual Space ◽  
Sound Generation ◽  
Generation System ◽  
Position Information ◽  
3D Data ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Audiovisual Interaction

In building-scale VR, where the entire interior of a large-scale building is a virtual space that users can walk around in, it is very important to handle movable objects that actually exist in the real world and not in the virtual space. We propose a mechanism to dynamically detect such objects (that are not embedded in the virtual space) in advance, and then generate a sound when one is hit with a virtual stick. Moreover, in a large indoor virtual environment, there may be multiple users at the same time, and their presence may be perceived by hearing, as well as by sight, e.g., by hearing sounds such as footsteps. We, therefore, use a GAN deep learning generation system to generate the impact sound from any object. First, in order to visually display a real-world object in virtual space, its 3D data is generated using an RGB-D camera and saved, along with its position information. At the same time, we take the image of the object and break it down into parts, estimate its material, generate the sound, and associate the sound with that part. When a VR user hits the object virtually (e.g., hits it with a virtual stick), a sound is generated. We demonstrate that users can judge the material from the sound, thus confirming the effectiveness of the proposed method.

scholarly journals A Novel Model-Based Reinforcement Learning Attitude Control Method for Virtual Reality Satellite

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Jian Zhang ◽  
Fengge Wu
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Reinforcement Learning ◽  
Real World ◽  
Attitude Control ◽  
Mixed Model ◽  
Control Method ◽  
Sensor Data ◽  
Dynamics Model ◽  
Goal State ◽  
The Impact

Observing the universe with virtual reality satellite is an amazing experience. An intelligent method of attitude control is the core object of research to achieve this goal. Attitude control is essentially one of the goal-state reaching tasks under constraints. Using reinforcement learning methods in real-world systems faces many challenges, such as insufficient samples, exploration safety issues, unknown actuator delays, and noise in the raw sensor data. In this work, a mixed model with different input sizes was proposed to represent the environmental dynamics model. The predication accuracy of the environmental dynamics model and the performance of the policy trained in this paper were gradually improved. Our method reduces the impact of noisy data on the model’s accuracy and improves the sampling efficiency. The experiments showed that the agent trained with our method completed a goal-state reaching task in a real-world system under wireless circumstances whose actuators were reaction wheels, whereas the soft actor-critic method failed in the same training process. The method’s effectiveness is ensured theoretically under given conditions.

scholarly journals Virtual Reality and Situated Experiential Education A conceptualisation and exploratory trial.pdf

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Schott ◽  
Stephen Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Virtual Environment ◽  
Learning Environments ◽  
Experiential Education ◽  
Real World ◽  
Virtual Space ◽  
Immersive Environments ◽  
Education Environment ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Large Groups

<p>Virtual reality is widely recognised as offering the potential for fully immersive environments. This paper describes a framework that guides the creation and analysis of immersive environments that are pedagogically structured to support situated and experiential education. The “situated experiential education environment” framework described in this paper is used to examine the impact that a virtual environment can have on the user experience of participants in a virtual space. The analysis of a virtual environment implemented to support learner exploration of issues of tourism development and the related impacts suggests that this type of experience is capable of providing participants with a holistic experience of real world environments that are otherwise too expensive, impractical or unethical for large groups of people to visit in person. The pedagogical value of such experiences is enabled through immersion in a reality-based environment, engagement with complex and ambiguous situations and information, and interaction with the space, other students and teachers. The results demonstrate that complex immersive learning environments are readily achievable but that high levels of interactivity remains a challenge.</p>

Virtual Reality and Situated Experiential Education A conceptualisation and exploratory trial.pdf

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Schott ◽  
Stephen Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Virtual Environment ◽  
Learning Environments ◽  
Experiential Education ◽  
Real World ◽  
Virtual Space ◽  
Immersive Environments ◽  
Education Environment ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Large Groups

<p>Virtual reality is widely recognised as offering the potential for fully immersive environments. This paper describes a framework that guides the creation and analysis of immersive environments that are pedagogically structured to support situated and experiential education. The “situated experiential education environment” framework described in this paper is used to examine the impact that a virtual environment can have on the user experience of participants in a virtual space. The analysis of a virtual environment implemented to support learner exploration of issues of tourism development and the related impacts suggests that this type of experience is capable of providing participants with a holistic experience of real world environments that are otherwise too expensive, impractical or unethical for large groups of people to visit in person. The pedagogical value of such experiences is enabled through immersion in a reality-based environment, engagement with complex and ambiguous situations and information, and interaction with the space, other students and teachers. The results demonstrate that complex immersive learning environments are readily achievable but that high levels of interactivity remains a challenge.</p>

scholarly journals Product placement in computer/video games: an analysis of the impact on customers purchasing decision

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 60-70
Author(s):  
Angelina Chernikova ◽  
Murilo Branco
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Purchase Intention ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Product Placement ◽  
Theoretical Contribution ◽  
Brand Recognition ◽  
The Impact

The video game and virtual reality became a new way of doing marketing considering their growing popularity and the advances of new technologies in the past few decades. In this paper is presented a research that investigates the impact of product placement in video games on gamers’ decisions on the purchase of goods from advertised. This research is focused on two of the most played games nowadays: FIFA 19 and Final Fantasy XV. A survey with 465 respondents was conducted to understand the antecedents that impact the purchase decision considering the stimulus originated from the product placement. To conduct the survey, a framework was designed based in the extant literature reviewed and finally considering the constructs of product placement, quality of virtual reality, brand recognition, brand familiarity, emotional response and purchase frequency. The results of the study suggest that gamers generally respond positively towards product placement and that product placement can indirectly impact emotional responses that will impact on consumer’s purchase intention. Hence, advertising in the video game enhances brand recognition and the perception of virtual reality. The framework presented in this paper represents the theoretical contribution of this paper, relating different concepts in the theory of product placement to the purchase intention. Therefore, the findings on this paper can help managers to find the best way to reach customers by improving the product placement strategy in the video games.

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