The Metaverse is poised to be a future platform that redefines what it means to communicate, socialize, and interact with each other. Yet, it is important for us to consider avoiding the pitfalls of social media platforms we use today; cyberbullying, lack of transparency and an overall false mental model of society. In this paper, we propose the Empathic Metaverse, a virtual platform that prioritizes emotional sharing for assistance. It aims to cultivate prosocial behaviour, either egoistically or altruistically, so that our future society can better feel for each other and assist one another. To achieve this, we propose the platform to be bioresponsive; it reacts and adapts to an individual's physiological and cognitive state and reflects this via carefully designed avatars, environments, and interactions. We explore this concept in terms of three research directions: bioresponsive avatars, mediated communications and assistive tools.
@article{arxiv.2311.16610,
title = {The Empathic Metaverse: An Assistive Bioresponsive Platform For Emotional Experience Sharing},
author = {Yun Suen Pai and Mark Armstrong and Kinga Skiers and Anish Kundu and Danyang Peng and Yixin Wang and Tamil Selvan Gunasekaran and Chi-Lan Yang and Kouta Minamizawa},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.16610},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
5 pages including references, 4 figures, presented at the Towards an Inclusive and Accessible Metaverse (TIAM) Workshop at CHI 2023