Fiani, C., Bretin, R. , McGill, M. and Khamis, M. (2023) Big Buddy: Exploring Child Reactions and Parental Perceptions towards a Simulated Embodied Moderating System for Social Virtual Reality. In: Interaction Design and Children (IDC ’23), Chicago, IL, USA, 19–23 June 2023, ISBN 9798400701313 (doi: 10.1145/3585088.3589374)
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Abstract
Children experience new forms of harassment in Social Virtual Reality (VR), often inaccessible to parental oversight. We aimed to understand how an artificial intelligent moderator safeguarding children from harassment in social VR is perceived by children and parents, by introducing “Big Buddy”, a Wizard-of-Oz embodied AI-moderator. 43 children (aged 8-16) played a tower-block-construction game in a simulated Social VR classroom where fictitious competitors disrupted their game and, in experimental conditions where present, Big Buddy intervened. We measured children’s perceptions after the disruptions, towards Big Buddy, and the moderation actions it took. Children felt significantly less sad and safer when Big Buddy suspended the saboteur. Parents (n=17) noted Big Buddy’s usefulness and felt reassured but would remain in the supervision loop. We present the first empirical research of a VR-embodied AI-moderator with children’s and parents’ perspectives, and propose design directions for embodied AI-moderators in Social VR.
| Item Type: | Conference Proceedings |
|---|---|
| Additional Information: | This work was supported by the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Socially Intelligent Artificial Agents, Grant Number EP/S02266X/1 and partly sponsored by a 2020 Meta Research Award on Responsible Innovation. |
| Status: | Published |
| Refereed: | Yes |
| Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: | Bretin, Robin and Fiani, Cristina and Khamis, Dr Mohamed and McGill, Dr Mark |
| Authors: | Fiani, C., Bretin, R., McGill, M., and Khamis, M. |
| College/School: | College of Science and Engineering > School of Computing Science |
| ISBN: | 9798400701313 |
| Copyright Holders: | Copyright © 2023 Association for Computing Machinery |
| First Published: | First published in IDC '23: Proceedings of the 22nd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference |
| Publisher Policy: | Reproduced with the permission of the publisher |
| Related URLs: |
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