Have you ever been advised to “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes”? Considering other people’s points of view can be a daunting task, but admitting one’s mistakes and biases is the key to understanding between communities. By challenging our preconceptions, we can confront prejudice such as racism and xenophobia and potentially develop a more inclusive vision of others.
To help with empathy, MIT researchers developed On the Airplane, a virtual reality role-playing game (VR RPG) that simulates discrimination. In this case, the game depicts xenophobia towards Malaysian-American women, but the approach can be generalized. While on the plane, players can take on the role of characters from different walks of life, talk to others, and make in-game decisions based on a series of clues. In turn, the player’s decisions determine the outcome of tense conversations between characters about cultural differences.
As a virtual reality role-playing game, On a Plane encourages players to play as new characters from a first-person perspective that can go beyond their personal experience, allowing them to learn about different cultures from new perspectives. Players interact with three characters: Sarah, a first-generation Malaysian-American Muslim who wears a hijab; Marianne, a midwestern white woman with little exposure to other cultures and customs; or a flight attendant. Sarah represents the outside group, Marianne is a member of the inside group, and the flight crew is a bystander watching the exchange between two passengers. “This project is part of our efforts to harness the power of virtual reality and artificial intelligence to combat social ills such as discrimination and xenophobia,” said Caglar Yildirim, a research fellow at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). author and co-game designer. “Through the exchange between two passengers, the player can experience how the xenophobia of one passenger manifests itself and how it affects the other. The simulation engages the player in critical thinking and attempts to develop a sense of empathy for the passengers, which is an “alternative” to conformism. to the “archetype” of what Americans should be.
Yildirim worked with Project Principal Investigator D. Fox Harrell, Professor of Digital Media and AI at MIT, CSAIL, Comparative Media Studies/Writing (CMS) Program, and Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS). founder and director of the Center for Advanced Virtualization at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “In a simulation, it’s impossible to convey someone else’s life experience, but while you can’t ‘empathize’ in that sense, a system like this can help people recognize and understand social patterns at work. Things like the issue of prejudice,” Harrell said. , who is also a co-author and project designer. “Engaging, immersive, and interactive storytelling can also emotionally impact people, opening the door to changing and expanding user perspectives.” This tool gives players the ability to change their position in the simulation by choosing responses to each prompt, thus affecting their proximity to the other two characters. For example, if you are playing as a flight attendant, you can change your affinity in response to Marianne’s xenophobic expressions and attitude towards Sarah. The engine will then present you with a different set of narrative events depending on how your relationship with others changes.
Each Airplane avatar is animated using AI knowledge representation methods driven by probabilistic finite state machines, a tool commonly used for pattern recognition in machine learning systems. With these machines, the character’s body language and gestures are customizable: if you’re playing as Marianne, the game will customize her behavior towards Sarah based on user input, affecting how comfortable she is with participants who are considered non-professionals. the player can do the same from the point of view of Sarah or the flight attendant. In a 2018 paper based on work done by MIT’s CSAIL and Qatar Institute of Computing, Harrell and co-author Serkan Shengyun argued for virtual systems developers to be more inclusive of Middle Eastern identities and customs. They argue that if designers allow users to customize avatars that better reflect their backgrounds, it could make them more player-friendly. Four years later, On the Airplane achieved the same goal by incorporating a Muslim perspective into a compelling setting.
“Many virtual identity systems such as avatars, accounts, profiles and player characters were not designed to meet the needs of people from different cultures. We used statistical and artificial intelligence methods combined with qualitative methods to understand where the gaps are,” they pointed out. “Our project helps change perspectives, allows people to respect each other, and improves understanding of the manifestations of different cultural avatars.”
Harrell and Yildirim’s work is part of MIT’s IDSS Initiative to Combat Systemic Racism (ICSR). Harrell sits on the initiative’s steering committee and is the leader of the newly formed Anti-Racism, Gaming and Immersive Media vertical, which explores behaviors, identities and behaviors related to race and racism in video games and immersive experiences. phenomena and computing systems.
The researchers’ latest project is part of the ICSR’s broader goal of initiating and coordinating interdisciplinary research to address processes of racial discrimination in US institutions. Using big data, participants in the research program develop and use computational tools that promote racial equality. Yildirim and Harrell do this by describing a common problem scenario that illustrates how prejudice infiltrates our daily lives. “In the post-9/11 world, Muslims often face racial profiling at US airports. The game also takes a novel approach to analyzing programmed bias using virtual reality rather than live experiments to simulate bias. Interestingly, this study shows that virtual reality can be be used as a tool to help us better measure bias and combat systemic racism and other forms of discrimination.On the Airplane was developed in the Unity game engine using the XR Interaction Toolkit and Harrell’s Chimeria platform to create interactive storytelling using social categorization. will be rolled out later this year on desktop PCs and the standalone Wireless Meta Quest headset and will be presented in December at the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality.
Post time: Jan-09-2023