While nothing can be more vivid, immediate and real than our own sensorial experiences, emerging virtual reality technologies are playing with the possibility of being able to share someone else's sensory reality. The Painter Project is a virtual environment where users see a video from a painter's point of view in tandem with a tracked rendering of their own hand while they paint on a physical canvas. The end result is an experiment in superimposition of one experiential reality on top of another, hopefully opening a new window into an artist's creative process. This explorative study tested this virtual environment on stimulating empathy and creativity. The findings indicate potential for this technology as a new expert-novice mentorship simulation.
Human interactions with human-like computer-generated Others (CGOs) have continued to become more prevalent in the rush to technologize societies. As such, the need for close analysis of mediative dynamics between humans and GCOs has become compelling. Relying on the theoretical framework of embodied enactive cognition, this paper will discuss designing human empathetic experiences of co-presence with GCOs. We propose a two-level idea of enactive simulation: First, the assumption of the first-order simulation (human simulating other) is built on the holistic assumption that humans understand others thanks to shared physical embodiment and enactive situatedness, while second-order simulation (designer simulating human simulating other) is the cognitive-affective means of the designer of human-machine encounters to apply their own first-order experiences to simulate the simulation the Experiencer. Our key assumption is that context is the defining component of co-presence, thereby allowing experimental situations of co-presence to be contextualized by means of mediated narratives. The case study experiment, Booth, designed to model affective-cognitive experiences of co-presence at encounters of human Experiencers with two artificial asylum seekers, allowed us to identify different factors of the dynamics influencing the experience of empathy and the ensuing decisions concerning the asylum, in particular, the contextualizing narrative.
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