VR Game for empathy development in young children

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 Russian 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 experience, which can help a player to experience 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 extra curriculum activity at school or at home.

Here is the video about the game: https://youtu.be/c6gMdx9zDFA 

Here is the link to website of the game: students: https://babayagavrgame.wordpress.com/

Team

This game made collaboratively with 15 graduate students from Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy, UCF within the class “GameLab” taught by Dr. Tom Carbone. 

Producers: Ekaterina Muravevskaia (Subject Matter Expert, Research, Creative Director), Brandon Kidwell (Project Lead, Level Designer), Lukas Nicola (Game Designer, Writer), Brian Foye (Project Manager), Ryan Stanley: Technical Designer.

Programmers: Nishanth Sundharesan (Lead Programmer, Tools), Aissa Ben Zayed (Gameplay, Tools Programmer), Krishna Yeragudipati (Systems Programmer).

Artists: Kay Ghering (Lead Artist, Technical Artist), Bailey Steggerda (Technical, UI Artist), Michael Vogel (Character Artist, Animator), Paul Salas (Character Artist, Animator), Ryan Hill (Character Artist, Animator), Tiffany Brodie (Environmental Artist), Melissa Almirall (Animator, Illustrator), Will Perez-Valines (Animator).

Research team: Fatemeh Tavassoli, Gabriel Coleman, Amanpreet Kapoor, Yerika Jimenez, Joseph Issac. Jr., Alex Lee, Shishin

Publications

Peer Reviewed Conference Papers 

• Muravevskaia, E., Tavassoli, F., & Gardner-McCune, C. (2016, June). Developing children’s cultural awareness and empathy through games and fairy tales. In Proceedings of the The 15th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children (pp. 701-706). ACM. Link to ACM library: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2935998

• Muravevskaia, E. (2017, October). Empathy Development in Young Children Using Interactive VR Games. In Extended Abstracts Publication of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (pp. 715-718). ACM. Link to ACM library: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3133229

Peer Reviewed Conference Posters and Abstracts

• Muravevskaia, C. Gardner-McCune (2017). Educational Virtual Reality Game for Promoting Empathy in Young Children. Proceedings of the 11th European Conference of Games Based Learning. Graz, Austria.

• Muravevskaia (2017). Interactive Games for Promoting Empathy in Young Children. 16th Interactive Design and Children (IDC) Conference (abstract)