Aitor Rovira

Bystander Responses to a Violent Incident in an Immersive Virtual Environment

Under what conditions will a bystander intervene to try to stop a violent attack by one person on another? It is generally believed that the greater the size of the crowd of bystanders, the less the chance that any of them will intervene. A complementary model is that social identity is critical as an explanatory variable. For example, when the bystander shares common social identity with the victim the probability of intervention is enhanced, other things being equal. However, it is generally not possible to study such hypotheses experimentally for practical and ethical reasons. Here we show that an experiment that depicts a violent incident at life-size in immersive virtual reality lends support to the social identity explanation. 40 male supporters of Arsenal Football Club in England were recruited for a two-factor between-groups experiment: the victim was either an Arsenal supporter or not (in-group/out-group), and looked towards the participant for help or not during the confrontation. The response variables were the numbers of verbal and physical interventions by the participant during the violent argument. The number of physical interventions had a significantly greater mean in the in-group condition compared to the out-group. The more that participants perceived that the Victim was looking to them for help the greater the number of interventions in the in-group but not in the out-group. These results are supported by standard statistical analysis of variance, with more detailed findings obtained by a symbolic regression procedure based on genetic programming. Verbal interventions made during their experience, and analysis of post-experiment interview data suggest that in-group members were more prone to confrontational intervention compared to the out-group who were more prone to make statements to try to diffuse the situation.

The use of virtual reality in the study of people's responses to violent incidents

This paper reviews experimental methods for the study of the responses of people to violence in digital media, and in particular considers the issues of internal validity and ecological validity or generalisability of results to events in the real world. Experimental methods typically involve a significant level of abstraction from reality, with participants required to carry out tasks that are far removed from violence in real life, and hence their ecological validity is questionable. On the other hand studies based on field data, while having ecological validity, cannot control multiple confounding variables that may have an impact on observed results, so that their internal validity is questionable. It is argued that immersive virtual reality may provide a unification of these two approaches. Since people tend to respond realistically to situations and events that occur in virtual reality, and since virtual reality simulations can be completely controlled for experimental purposes, studies of responses to violence within virtual reality are likely to have both ecological and internal validity. This depends on a property that we call ‘plausibility’ – including the fidelity of the depicted situation with prior knowledge and expectations. We illustrate this with data from a previously published experiment, a virtual reprise of Stanley Milgrams 1960s obedience experiment, and also with pilot data from a new study being developed that looks at bystander responses to violent incidents.

Embodying Compassion: A Virtual Reality Paradigm for Overcoming Excessive Self-Criticism

Virtual reality has been successfully used to study and treat psychological disorders such as phobias and posttraumatic stress disorder but has rarely been applied to clinically-relevant emotions other than fear and anxiety. Self-criticism is a ubiquitous feature of psychopathology and can be treated by increasing levels of self-compassion. We exploited the known effects of identification with a virtual body to arrange for healthy female volunteers high in self-criticism to experience self-compassion from an embodied first-person perspective within immersive virtual reality. Whereas observation and practice of compassionate responses reduced self-criticism, the additional experience of embodiment also increased self-compassion and feelings of being safe. The results suggest potential new uses for immersive virtual reality in a range of clinical conditions.

Embodying self-compassion within virtual reality and its effects on patients with depression.

Background Self-criticism is a ubiquitous feature of psychopathology and can be combatted by increasing levels of self-compassion. However, some patients are resistant to self-compassion. Aims To investigate whether the effects of self-identification with virtual bodies within immersive virtual reality could be exploited to increase self-compassion in patients with depression. Method We developed an 8-minute scenario in which 15 patients practised delivering compassion in one virtual body and then experienced receiving it from themselves in another virtual body. Results In an open trial, three repetitions of this scenario led to significant reductions in depression severity and self-criticism, as well as to a significant increase in self-compassion, from baseline to 4-week follow-up. Four patients showed clinically significant improvement. Conclusions The results indicate that interventions using immersive virtual reality may have considerable clinical potential and that further development of these methods preparatory to a controlled trial is now warranted. Declaration of interest None. Copyright and usage

Hypersensitivity to Contingent Behavior in Paranoia: A New Virtual Reality Paradigm

Abstract Contingency in interpersonal relationships is associated with the development of secure attachment and trust, whereas paranoia arises from the overattribution of negative intentions. We used a new virtual reality paradigm to experimentally investigate the impact of contingent behavior on trust along the paranoia continuum. Sixty-one healthy participants were randomly allocated to have a social interaction with a pleasant virtual human (avatar) programmed to be highly responsive or not (high/low contingency). Perceived trustworthiness and trusting behavior were assessed alongside control variables attachment and anxiety. Higher paranoia and dismissive attachment were associated with larger interpersonal distances. Unexpectedly, extremely paranoid individuals experienced the highly contingent avatar as more trustworthy than their low contingency counterpart. Higher dismissive attachment was also associated with more subjective trust in both conditions. Extreme paranoia is associated with hypersensitivity to noncontingent behavior, which might explain experiences of mistrust when others are not highly responsive in everyday social situations.

Reinforcement Learning as a tool to make people move to a specific location in Immersive Virtual Reality

This paper describes the use of Reinforcement Learning in Immersive Virtual Reality to make a person move to a specific location in a virtual environment. Reinforcement Learning is a sub-area of Machine Learning in which an active entity called an agent interacts with its environment and learns how to act in order to achieve a pre-determined goal. The Reinforcement Learning had no prior model of behaviour and the participants no prior knowledge that their task was to move to and stay in a specific place. The participants were placed in a virtual environment where they had to avoid collisions with virtual projectiles. Following each projectile the agent analysed the movement made by the participant to determine paths of future projectiles in order to increase the chance of driving participants to the goal position and make them stay there as long as possible. The experiment was carried out with 30 participants, 10 were guided towards the leftmost part of the environment, 10 to the rightmost area, and 10 were used as control group where the projectiles were shot randomly throughout the game. Our results show that people tended to stay close to the target area in both the Left and Right conditions, but not in the Random condition. HighlightsWe used of Reinforcement Learning in Immersive Virtual Reality to make a person move to a specific place.The Reinforcement Learning agent had no prior knowledge of human behaviour.People tended to stay near the target area.Reinforcement learning can be used to predict the movements of the people.

EyeAR: Refocusable Augmented Reality Content through Eye Measurements

The human visual system always focuses at a distinct depth. Therefore, objects that lie at different depths appear blurred, a phenomenon known as Depth of Field (DoF); as the users focus depth changes, different objects come in and out of focus. Augmented Reality (AR) is a technology that superimposes computer graphics (CG) images onto a users view of the real world. A commonly used AR display device is an Optical See-Through Head-Mounted Display (OST-HMD), enabling users to observe the real-world directly, with CG added to it. A common problem in such systems is the mismatch between the DoF properties of the users eyes and the virtual camera used to generate CG.In this demonstration, we present an improved version of the system presented in [11] as two implementations: The first as a high quality tabletop system, the second as a component which has been integrated into the Microsoft Hololens [18].

EyeAR: Empiric Evaluation of a Refocusable Augmented Reality System

We present the evaluation of EyeAR, a display with refocusable content based on users eyes measurements. We carried out a user study to validate the prototype to verify that participants cannot distinguish between real and virtual objects. Participants looked at three pillars (one of which was virtual) placed at different distances from the user. They had to guess which pillar was the virtual one while freely refocusing. The results partially confirmed that our prototype creates virtual objects that are indistinguishable from real objects.

The impact of enhanced projector display on the responses of people to a violent scenario in immersive virtual reality

This paper describes the impact of display resolution and luminance on the responses of participants in a behavioral study that used a projection-based Immersive Virtual Reality System. The scenario was a virtual bar where participants witnessed a violent attack of one person on another due to an argument about support for a soccer club. The major response variable was the number of interventions made by participants. The study was between-groups with 10 participants in two groups pre-upgrade and post-upgrade, both in the same 4-screen Cave-like system. However, the post-upgrade group experienced the scenario with projectors that had a significantly higher level of resolution and luminance than those experienced by the pre-upgrade group. The results show that, other things being equal, the number of both verbal and physical interventions was greater amongst those in the post-upgrade group compared to the pre-upgrade group.