Near and Dear: Designing Relatable VR Agents for Training Games
Authors: 
Sonam Adinolf, Peta Wyeth, Ross Brown, and Leonie SimpsonAuthors Info & Claims
Sonam Adinolf, Peta Wyeth, Ross Brown, and Leonie SimpsonAuthors Info & ClaimsDecember 2020
Pages 413 - 425
Abstract
Agents are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in people’s lives. There is potential for agents to aid scalability of digital learning and training. Research has noted the reduction in personal interactions as such applications reach a broader population. There is a gap in literature with regards to virtual agents as relatable learning companions. This paper presents the findings from three ideation workshops with different expert groups centered around designing playful interactions with a digital agent in Virtual Reality (VR), in the context of cybersecurity training. The workshop discussions were subjected to thematic analysis to extract design insights. The design insights fall into three broad categories: thematic (e.g., different metaphors to translate cybersecurity concepts), stylistic (e.g., less realistic art), and mechanical (e.g., VR gestures). This work contributes to HCI by producing a set of design insights to inform design of agent based VR learning environments.
References
[1]
2017. Equal Reality: Soft Skills, Diversity and Inclusion VR Training. http://www.equalreality.com/
[2]
Jemal Abawajy. 2014. User preference of cyber security awareness delivery methods. Behaviour & Information Technology 33, 3 (2014), 237–248. https://doi.org/10.1080/0144929X.2012.708787 arXiv:https://doi.org/10.1080/0144929X.2012.708787
[3]
Nicoletta Adamo, Hazar N Dib, and Nicholas J Villani. 2019. Animated Agents’ Facial Emotions: Does the Agent Design Make a Difference?. In International Conference on Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality and Computer Graphics. Springer, 10–25.
[4]
Olusegun Agboola Sogunro. 2004. Efficacy of role-playing pedagogy in training leaders: some reflections. Journal of Management Development 23, 4 (2004), 355–371.
[5]
Roger Altizer and José Pablo Zagal. 2014. Designing Inside the Box or Pitching Practices in Industry and Education. In DiGRA.
[6]
Roger Altizer Jr, José P Zagal, Erin Johnson, Bob Wong, Rebecca Anderson, Jeffery Botkin, and Erin Rothwell. 2017. Design Box Case Study: Facilitating Interdisciplinary Collaboration and Participatory Design in Game Developm. In Extended Abstracts Publication of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play. ACM, 405–412.
[7]
Nalin Asanka Gamagedara Arachchilage and Steve Love. 2013. A game design framework for avoiding phishing attacks. Computers in Human Behavior 29, 3 (May 2013), 706–714. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2012.12.018
[8]
Alex Asen. 2019. Are You Spending Enough on Cybersecurity?https://www.bcg.com/en-au/publications/2019/are-you-spending-enough-cybersecurity.aspx
[9]
Jeremy N Bailenson, Kim Swinth, Crystal Hoyt, Susan Persky, Alex Dimov, and Jim Blascovich. 2005. The independent and interactive effects of embodied-agent appearance and behavior on self-report, cognitive, and behavioral markers of copresence in immersive virtual environments. Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments 14, 4(2005), 379–393.
[10]
Jakki O Bailey and Jeremy N Bailenson. 2017. Considering virtual reality in children’s lives. Journal of Children and Media 11, 1 (2017), 107–113.
[11]
Albert Bandura. 2001. Social cognitive theory: An agentic perspective. Annual review of psychology 52, 1 (2001), 1–26.
[12]
Rachel KE Bellamy, Sean Andrist, Timothy Bickmore, Elizabeth F Churchill, and Thomas Erickson. 2017. Human-Agent Collaboration: Can an Agent be a Partner?. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 1289–1294.
[13]
Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke. 2006. Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative research in psychology 3, 2 (2006), 77–101.
[14]
Fabio Buttussi and Luca Chittaro. 2017. Effects of different types of virtual reality display on presence and learning in a safety training scenario. IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics 24, 2(2017), 1063–1076.
[15]
Brian Cashell, William D Jackson, Mark Jickling, and Baird Webel. 2004. The economic impact of cyber-attacks. Congressional Research Service Documents, CRS RL32331 (Washington DC) (2004).
[16]
Jason A Chen, Jon R Star, Chris Dede, and M Shane Tutwiler. 2018. Technology-rich activities: One type does not motivate all. Contemporary Educational Psychology 54 (2018), 153–170.
[17]
Tianying Chen, Jessica Hammer, and Laura Dabbish. 2019. Self-Efficacy-Based Game Design to Encourage Security Behavior Online. In Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI EA ’19. ACM Press, Glasgow, Scotland Uk, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290607.3312935
[18]
Benjamin D Cone, Cynthia E Irvine, Michael F Thompson, and Thuy D Nguyen. 2007. A video game for cyber security training and awareness. Computers & Security 26, 1 (2007), 63–72.
[19]
Scotty D Craig, Jessica Twyford, Norma Irigoyen, and Sarah A Zipp. 2015. A test of spatial contiguity for virtual human’s gestures in multimedia learning environments. Journal of Educational Computing Research 53, 1 (2015), 3–14.
[20]
Robert Cuthbert, Selen Turkay, Ross Brown, Daniel Johnson, Roger Altizer Jr, and Mathilde Desselle. 2020. Tradies, technology and therapy: Towards designing gameful VR environments for burn rehabilitation. In Proceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI PLAY’20): November 2–4, 2020, Virtual Event, Canada. Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
[21]
Kerstin Dautenhahn, Michael Walters, Sarah Woods, Kheng Lee Koay, Chrystopher L Nehaniv, A Sisbot, Rachid Alami, and Thierry Siméon. 2006. How may I serve you?: a robot companion approaching a seated person in a helping context. In Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCHI/SIGART conference on Human-robot interaction. ACM, 172–179.
[22]
Chris Dede, Tina A Grotzer, Amy Kamarainen, and Shari J Metcalf. 2017. Virtual reality as an immersive medium for authentic simulations. In Virtual, augmented, and mixed realities in education. Springer, 133–156.
[23]
Tilman Dingler, Kai Kunze, and Benjamin Outram. 2018. VR reading UIs: Assessing text parameters for reading in VR. In Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, LBW094.
[24]
Jesse Fox, Sun Joo Ahn, Joris H Janssen, Leo Yeykelis, Kathryn Y Segovia, and Jeremy N Bailenson. 2015. Avatars versus agents: a meta-analysis quantifying the effect of agency on social influence. Human–Computer Interaction 30, 5 (2015), 401–432.
[25]
Anthony G Gallagher, E Matt Ritter, Howard Champion, Gerald Higgins, Marvin P Fried, Gerald Moses, C Daniel Smith, and Richard M Satava. 2005. Virtual reality simulation for the operating room: proficiency-based training as a paradigm shift in surgical skills training. Annals of surgery 241, 2 (2005), 364.
[26]
Scott A Ginder, Janice E Kelly-Reid, and Farrah B Mann. 2019. Enrollment and Employees in Postsecondary Institutions, Fall 2017; and Financial Statistics and Academic Libraries, Fiscal Year 2017: First Look (Provisional Data). NCES 2019-021Rev.National Center for Education Statistics(2019).
[27]
Arthur Graesser and Danielle McNamara. 2010. Self-regulated learning in learning environments with pedagogical agents that interact in natural language. Educational Psychologist 45, 4 (2010), 234–244.
[28]
Agneta Gulz and Magnus Haake. 2006. Virtual pedagogical agents–design guidelines regarding visual appearance and pedagogical roles. Current Developments in Technology-Assisted Education,© FORMATEX 2006 (2006).
[29]
Agneta Gulz, Magnus Haake, Annika Silvervarg, Björn Sjödén, and George Veletsianos. 2011. Building a social conversational pedagogical agent: Design challenges and methodological approaches. In Conversational agents and natural language interaction: Techniques and effective practices. IGI Global, 128–155.
[30]
Maurice Hendrix, Ali Al-Sherbaz, and Victoria Bloom. 2016. Game Based Cyber Security Training: are Serious Games suitable for cyber security training?International Journal of Serious Games 3, 1 (March 2016). https://doi.org/10.17083/ijsg.v3i1.107
[31]
James Hollan, Edwin Hutchins, and David Kirsh. 2000. Distributed cognition: toward a new foundation for human-computer interaction research. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) 7, 2(2000), 174–196.
[32]
Lasse Jensen and Flemming Konradsen. 2018. A review of the use of virtual reality head-mounted displays in education and training. Education and Information Technologies 23, 4 (2018), 1515–1529.
[33]
Cody O Karutz and Jeremy N Bailenson. 2015. Immersive virtual environments and the classrooms of tomorrow. The handbook of the psychology of communication technology 33 (2015), 290.
[34]
Mahwish Khan. 2018. Anti-Phishing Training vs. Software: Does Security Awareness Training Work?https://resources.infosecinstitute.com/anti-phishing-training-vs-software-does-security-awareness-training-work/
[35]
Kangsoo Kim, Luke Boelling, Steffen Haesler, Jeremy Bailenson, Gerd Bruder, and Greg F Welch. 2018. Does a digital assistant need a body? The influence of visual embodiment and social behavior on the perception of intelligent virtual agents in AR. In 2018 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR). IEEE, 105–114.
[36]
Yanghee Kim and Amy L Baylor. 2006. A social-cognitive framework for pedagogical agents as learning companions. Educational Technology Research and Development 54, 6(2006), 569–596.
[37]
Charles K Kinzer, D Hoffman, Selen Turkay, Nilgun Gunbas, Pantiphar Chantes, Tatyana Dvorkin, and Apichai Chaiwinij. 2012. The impact of choice and feedback on learning, motivation, and performance in an educational video game. In Proceedings of the games, learning, and society conference, Vol. 2. ETC Pittsburgh, PA, 175–181.
[38]
Karen D Könings, Tina Seidel, and Jeroen JG van Merriënboer. 2014. Participatory design of learning environments: integrating perspectives of students, teachers, and designers. Instructional Science 42, 1 (2014), 1–9.
[39]
Tom Kontogiannis, Marko Gerbec, and Mehdi Sbaouni. 2019. Effective virtual reality training for safety critical activities in the process industry. In Total Safety and the Productivity Challenge. Routledge, 187–207.
[40]
Steven T. Kroll. 2019. Is Virtual Reality The Next Generation In Security Awareness Training?https://cybersecurityventures.com/is-virtual-reality-the-next-generation-in-security-awareness-training/
[41]
Christian R Larsen, Jette L Soerensen, Teodor P Grantcharov, Torur Dalsgaard, Lars Schouenborg, Christian Ottosen, Torben V Schroeder, and Bent S Ottesen. 2009. Effect of virtual reality training on laparoscopic surgery: randomised controlled trial. Bmj 338(2009), b1802.
[42]
R Dwight Laws, Scott L Howell, and Nathan K Lindsay. 2003. Scalability in distance education:“Can we have our cake and eat it too?”. Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration 6, 4(2003), 80–89.
[43]
Elinda Ai-Lim Lee and Kok Wai Wong. 2008. A review of using virtual reality for learning. In Transactions on edutainment I. Springer, 231–241.
[44]
Tze Wei Liew, Tan Su-Mae, and Chandrika Jayothisa. 2013. The Effects of Peer-Like and Expert-Like Pedagogical Agents on Learners? Agent Perceptions, Task-Related Attitudes, and Learning Achievement. Journal of Educational Technology & Society 16, 4 (2013), 275.
[45]
Ntima Mabanza. 2018. Gender Influences on Preference of Pedagogical Interface Agents. In 2018 International Conference on Intelligent and Innovative Computing Applications (ICONIC). IEEE, 1–5.
[46]
Manuela Macedonia, Iris Groher, and Friedrich Roithmayr. 2014. Intelligent virtual agents as language trainers facilitate multilingualism. Frontiers in psychology 5 (2014), 295.
[47]
Guido Makransky, Stefan Borre-Gude, and Richard E Mayer. 2019. Motivational and cognitive benefits of training in immersive virtual reality based on multiple assessments. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning(2019).
[48]
Guido Makransky, Philip Wismer, and Richard E Mayer. 2019. A gender matching effect in learning with pedagogical agents in an immersive virtual reality science simulation. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning 35, 3 (2019), 349–358.
[49]
Richard E Mayer and C Scott DaPra. 2012. An embodiment effect in computer-based learning with animated pedagogical agents.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied 18, 3 (2012), 239.
[50]
John F Meech. 1999. Narrative theories as contextual constraints for agent interaction. In 1999 Fall American Association for Artificial Intelligence Narrative Intelligence Symposium, USA. 38.
[51]
Rolf Molich and Jakob Nielsen. 1990. Improving a human-computer dialogue. Commun. ACM 33, 3 (1990), 338–348.
[52]
Masahiro Mori, Karl F MacDorman, and Norri Kageki. 2012. The uncanny valley [from the field]. IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine 19, 2 (2012), 98–100.
[53]
Rodney D Myers and Charles M Reigeluth. 2016. Designing games for learning. In Instructional-Design Theories and Models, Volume IV. Routledge, 221–258.
[54]
Clifford Nass, Jonathan Steuer, and Ellen R Tauber. 1994. Computers are social actors. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems. 72–78.
[55]
Jakob Nielsen. 1994. Enhancing the explanatory power of usability heuristics. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 152–158.
[56]
Christoph Nikendei, Bernd Kraus, Markus Schrauth, Peter Weyrich, S Zipfel, Wolfgang Herzog, and Jana Jünger. 2007. Integration of role-playing into technical skills training: a randomized controlled trial. Medical teacher 29, 9-10 (2007), 956–960.
[57]
C Nikendei, A Zeuch, P Dieckmann, C Roth, S Schäfer, M Völkl, D Schellberg, W Herzog, and J Jünger. 2005. Role-playing for more realistic technical skills training. Medical teacher 27, 2 (2005), 122–126.
[58]
Nahal Norouzi, Kangsoo Kim, Jason Hochreiter, Myungho Lee, Salam Daher, Gerd Bruder, and Greg Welch. 2018. A systematic survey of 15 years of user studies published in the intelligent virtual agents conference. In Proceedings of the 18th international conference on intelligent virtual agents. 17–22.
[59]
Catherine S. Oh, Jeremy N. Bailenson, and Gregory F. Welch. 2018. A Systematic Review of Social Presence: Definition, Antecedents, and Implications. Frontiers in Robotics and AI 5 (2018), 114. https://doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2018.00114
[60]
Sandra Y Okita, Selen Turkay, Mihwa Kim, and Yumiko Murai. 2013. Learning by teaching with virtual peers and the effects of technological design choices on learning. Computers & Education 63 (2013), 176–196.
[61]
Veronica S Pantelidis. 2010. Reasons to use virtual reality in education and training courses and a model to determine when to use virtual reality. Themes in Science and Technology Education 2, 1-2 (2010), 59–70.
[62]
Lucas Pope. 2013. Papers Please. Game [SNES]. 3909 LLC.
[63]
Byron Reeves and Clifford Ivar Nass. 1996. The media equation: How people treat computers, television, and new media like real people and places.Cambridge university press.
[64]
Richard M Ryan and Edward L Deci. 2000. Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations: Classic definitions and new directions. Contemporary educational psychology 25, 1 (2000), 54–67.
[65]
Rafael Sacks, Amotz Perlman, and Ronen Barak. 2013. Construction safety training using immersive virtual reality. Construction Management and Economics 31, 9 (2013), 1005–1017.
[66]
Ron Schlecht. 2018. Augmented reality could help solve the cybersecurity talent gap. https://www.scmagazine.com/home/security-news/augmented-reality-could-help-solve-the-cybersecurity-talent-gap/
[67]
Joseph Seering, Michal Luria, Geoff Kaufman, and Jessica Hammer. 2019. Beyond Dyadic Interactions: Considering Chatbots as Community Members. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Glasgow, Scotland Uk) (CHI ’19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 450, 13 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300680
[68]
Neal E Seymour, Anthony G Gallagher, Sanziana A Roman, Michael K O’Brien, Vipin K Bansal, Dana K Andersen, and Richard M Satava. 2002. Virtual reality training improves operating room performance: results of a randomized, double-blinded study. Annals of surgery 236, 4 (2002), 458.
[69]
Gary D Sherman, Selen Türkay, Samuel T Moulton, Michael C Friedman, Negeen Darani, Brian Daly, and Stephanie Kayden. 2019. The generalized sense of power is a psychological resource: Evidence from a disaster response field training exercise. European Journal of Social Psychology(2019).
[70]
Masahiro Shiomi, Kayako Nakagawa, Kazuhiko Shinozawa, Reo Matsumura, Hiroshi Ishiguro, and Norihiro Hagita. 2017. Does a robot’s touch encourage human effort?International Journal of Social Robotics 9, 1 (2017), 5–15.
[71]
Mel Slater. 2017. Implicit learning through embodiment in immersive virtual reality. In Virtual, augmented, and mixed realities in education. Springer, 19–33.
[72]
Stergios Tegos, Stavros Demetriadis, Georgios Psathas, and Thrasyvoulos Tsiatsos. 2019. A Configurable Agent to Advance Peers’ Productive Dialogue in MOOCs. In International Workshop on Chatbot Research and Design. Springer, 245–259.
[73]
Selen Türkay, Hadas Eidelman, Yigal Rosen, Daniel Seaton, Glenn Lopez, and Jacob Whitehill. 2017. Getting to know English language learners in MOOCs: Their motivations, behaviors, and outcomes. In Proceedings of the Fourth (2017) ACM Conference on Learning@ Scale. 209–212.
[74]
Selen Turkay, Daniel Hoffman, Charles K Kinzer, Pantiphar Chantes, and Christopher Vicari. 2014. Toward understanding the potential of games for learning: Learning theory, game design characteristics, and situating video games in classrooms. Computers in the Schools 31, 1-2 (2014), 2–22.
[75]
Austin van Loon, Jeremy Bailenson, Jamil Zaki, Joshua Bostick, and Robb Willer. 2018. Virtual reality perspective-taking increases cognitive empathy for specific others. PloS one 13, 8 (2018), e0202442.
[76]
George Veletsianos, Robert Heller, Scott Overmyer, and Mike Procter. 2010. Conversational agents in virtual worlds: Bridging disciplines. British Journal of Educational Technology 41, 1 (2010), 123–140.
[77]
George Veletsianos, Charles Miller, and Aaron Doering. 2009. EnALI: A research and design framework for virtual characters and pedagogical agents. Journal of Educational Computing Research 41, 2 (2009), 171–194.
[78]
Arun Vishwanath. 2017. Why Most Cyber Security Training Fails and What We Can Do About It. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L3IrAN30a4
[79]
Fuxing Wang, Wenjing Li, Richard E Mayer, and Huashan Liu. 2018. Animated pedagogical agents as aids in multimedia learning: Effects on eye-fixations during learning and learning outcomes.Journal of Educational Psychology 110, 2 (2018), 250.
[80]
Isaac Wang, Jesse Smith, and Jaime Ruiz. 2019. Exploring Virtual Agents for Augmented Reality. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 281.
[81]
Bryan Watkins. 2014. The Impact of Cyber Attacks on the Private Sector. (2014), 11.
[82]
David Wiley. 2006. Scalability and sociability in online learning environments. Web-based learning: Theory, research, and practice (2006), 295–306.
[83]
J Yuan and C Kim. 2014. Guidelines for facilitating the development of learning communities in online courses. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning 30, 3 (2014), 220–232.
[84]
Brian S Zaff, Michael D McNeese, and Daniel E Snyder. 1993. Capturing multiple perspectives: a user-centered approach to knowledge and design acquisition. Knowledge Acquisition 5, 1 (1993), 79–116.
Recommendations
Towards Designing Agent Based Virtual Reality Applications for Cybersecurity Training
OzCHI '19: Proceedings of the 31st Australian Conference on Human-Computer-InteractionAgents are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in people's lives. There is potential for agents to help with scalability of digital learning and training. This paper presents the findings from two ideation workshops centered around designing a short ...
Designing Games for Presence in Consumer Virtual Reality
SIGMIS-CPR '16: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGMIS Conference on Computers and People ResearchWith virtual reality technologies entering the consumer market this year, it is the task of those producing content for the virtual reality platform to ensure that users have an experience that lives up to expectations. Virtual reality comes with its ...
VR Grabbers: Ungrounded Haptic Retargeting for Precision Grabbing Tools
UIST '18: Proceedings of the 31st Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and TechnologyHaptic feedback in VR is important for realistic simulation in virtual reality. However, recreating the haptic experience for hand tools in VR traditionally requires hardware with precise actuators, adding complexity to the system. We propose Ungrounded ...
Comments
Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
December 2020
764 pages
ISBN:9781450389754
DOI:10.1145/3441000
Copyright © 2020 ACM.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 15 February 2021
Check for updates
Author Tags
Qualifiers
- Research-article
- Research
- Refereed limited
Conference
OzCHI '20
OzCHI '20: 32nd Australian Conference on Human-Computer-Interaction
December 2 - 4, 2020
NSW, Sydney, Australia
Acceptance Rates
Overall Acceptance Rate 362 of 729 submissions, 50%
Contributors
Other Metrics
Bibliometrics & Citations
Bibliometrics
Article Metrics
- 0Total Citations
- 211Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)60
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2
Other Metrics
Citations
View Options
Get Access
Login options
Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.
Sign inFull Access
View options
View or Download as a PDF file.
PDFeReader
View online with eReader.
eReaderHTML Format
View this article in HTML Format.
HTML Format