Stanford, UCF Study finds people avoid virtual humans

UCF Endowed Chair Greg Welch is a co-author of the study, which was conducted in partnership with Stanford University.

Interacting with virtual humans in an augmented reality (AR) training environment seems to carry over into the real world, prompting people to respect the personal space of virtual characters even when they are no longer visible. That’s one of the findings in a new study Stanford University and the University of Central Florida (UCF) published in the journal PLOS ONE.

The results of three experiments included in the studyindicate that AR experiences can affect real-world behavior, which is importantas AR is being used more and more to train nurses, doctors and other healthcare professionals.

“Part of the goal of trying to create virtual humans forhealth care education is that they produce reactions from the health careprovider or elicit behaviors corresponding to a real person,” says Greg Welch,an endowed chair in UCF’s College of Nursing who is a co-author of the study.“You want the students to act in the learning environment as if it was real.So, for example, students should connect to a virtual patient as they would areal patient.”

Health care training often relies on medical trainingmannequins or patients portrayed by skilled actors. These simulated patientsallow students to learn in a safe environment, where mistakes don’t actuallyharm a real patient.

With the addition of AR, which superimposes digital imageson real-world environments, the richness and realism of the experiences arethought to be increased. For example, AR could be used to show a student athree-dimensional diagram of a mannequin patient’s organs or to simulate apatient’s parents so that students can practice breaking bad news to lovedones.

The use of AR in health care training is infrequent butincreasing in use, Welch says.

The study consisted of three experiments, each exploring therelationship between people and AR.

In the first experiment, researchers found participantscompleted hard tasks less proficiently and easy tasks better when an AR personwas present, mimicking the typical real-world occurrences of socialfacilitation and inhibition.

In the third experiment, researchers found that peoplewearing headset equipment allowing them to see AR images felt less connected topeople who were not wearing headsets.

The second experiment, which reinforces prior work by Welchand study co-author Jeremy Bailenson, a professor in Stanford University’sDepartment of Communication, examined whether subjects in an AR setting wouldsit in a chair already perceived to be occupied by a virtual human.

The researchers found that most people would not sit in thechair occupied by the AR person, even if they had their AR headsets off andcould see no one was really there. Additionally, no participants wearing the ARheadsets and seeing the AR person sat in the virtually occupied chair.

Previous work by Welch and colleagues has also found peoplewould avoid walking through a virtual human who was only visible through an ARheadset, even after removing the AR headset.

“If a person is present, we generally try to give themspace,” Welch says. “There’s something ingrained in our human nature andreinforced through real world cultural norms that makes it hard for us toviolate another person’s space. We choose to avoid each other if possible.”

The emerging understanding supports the idea that realpeople tend to treat AR people as if they were really present, supporting theidea that AR patients or AR family members of patients could be effectiveadditions to health care education.

“Showing that AR technology is effective in suchcircumstances is a small step toward people having confidence in using it fortraining,” Welch said.

The research was carried out at Stanford University inCalifornia.

Co-authors of the study also included Mark Roman Miller, adoctoral student in Stanford’s Computer Science Department; Hanseul Jun andFernanda Herrera, doctoral students in Stanford’s Department of Communication;and Jacob Yu Villa, a graduate of Stanford’s Symbolic Systems Program.

Welch is the AdventHealth Endowed Chair in HealthcareSimulation at UCF’s College of Nursing. He is also the co-director of the UCFSynthetic Reality Laboratory. He holds additional faculty appointments in theDepartment of Computer Science at the UCF College of Engineering and ComputerScience and in the UCF Institute for Simulation & Training. He received hisdoctorate and master’s degrees in computer science from the University of NorthCarolina at Chapel Hill and his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineeringtechnology from Purdue University. He joined UCF in 2011.

Source: University of Central Florida