Cooking in the dark: a mixed reality empathy experience for the embodiment of blindness

Abstract

In the context of promoting a sense of empathy for the difference in people without disabilities, we propose a gaming experience that allows users to embody having a visual impairment. By occluding the user’s vision and providing spatialized audio and passive haptic feedback, allied with a speech recognition digital assistant, our goal is to offer a multi-sensory experience to enhance the user’s sense of embodiment inside a mixed reality blindness simulation. Inside the game environment, while expecting a guest to arrive, the player is required to cook a meal completely in the dark. Being aided solely by their remaining senses and a digital assistant, players must go through several tasks as to prepare dinner in time, risking to lose a love interest.

Exploring the Educational Value and Impact of Vision-Impairment Simulations on Sympathy and Empathy with XREye

“…For our evaluation, we divided our expert-study participants into two groups: users, who tested the simulation themselves (using the HWD), and spectators, who watched live while users were testing the simulation. To be able to compare our results to a baseline (people who have neither tested nor watched our simulation), we decided to compare our results to the results from the "sighted pre-test" conducted by Guarese et al [42]. The authors conducted an online study with sighted participants prior to their own user study, to assess their sympathy and empathy towards people with vision impairments, based on their own experience (not based on any experiment).…”

“…The authors conducted an online study with sighted participants prior to their own user study, to assess their sympathy and empathy towards people with vision impairments, based on their own experience (not based on any experiment). We included their data (Guarese et al [42] pre-test participants) as the baseline in our evaluation. Table 1 shows the questionnaire items included in our quantitative evaluation.…”

“…The work by Guarese et al [42], which focused on assistive technology, presented an approach for sympathy and empathy evaluations based on the Ad Response Sympathy (ARS) and Ad Response Empathy (ARE) tests from Escalas and Stern [37]. Guarese et al developed an AR device as an assistive technology for micro-guidance in simple object-placement tasks in a kitchen environment.…”

“…While previous work on simulating vision impairments took large steps towards the goal of increased awareness and understanding for those suffering from these impairments, an evaluation of the educational value and effect of vision impairment simulations on sympathy and empathy is still missing. With the study of XREye [10] presented in this work, we sought to understand whether more realistic, immersive, and tunable visualizations could indeed increase the sympathy and empathy expressed towards those with the conditions and build upon the work of Guarese et al [42] to evaluate our results.…”

“…To answer research question Q1, we added questions about sympathy and empathy from Guarese et al [42] as questionnaire items 8-10 (see Table 1). We chose these particular questions because they did not require participants to complete any specific tasks.…”