Blog

Creating for a Cause at the 2021 XR Brain Jam

p2p

Just before Independence Day Weekend, both Veronica and Brandon took part in the 2021 Games for Change XR Brain Jam, an event organized to bring scholars and developers together to exchange ideas and create game prototypes that address current social issues. While Veronica and Brandon have experience designing games for health and behavior change, this was their first time doing so with only 48 hours to go from concept to playable build; an exciting, but considerable challenge.

Veronica’s group, Team 3: Neuromancers, came together to create a VR game to increase positive emotions while reducing negative self-image through a short and intuitive body positivity game for teens. Their creation, PowrPosrVR, instructs players to strike various power poses shown to increase feelings of confidence and capability, and PowrPosrVR rewards players for successfully replicating these poses by having their smiling flower avatar’s body and attached positive sprites move and change colors. After the Brain Jam judges spent some time deliberating on all the projects presented, they awarded Veronica’s team with the award for Best XR Innovation and invited her team to present during the upcoming Games for Change Festival!

Brandon’s group, Team 5: XRStellar, primarily consisted of a group of XR developers, User Experience and Interaction designers, and Environment designers from the University of Miami. They began by speaking about the different social issues that they found particularly difficult to approach, as well as the strengths that a medium like VR technology can provide for empathy and immersion. From this first conversation as a team, Café SereniTea, a VR game to teach self-regulation and peer support skills during panic attack situations, was born. In Café SereniTea, the players take two perspectives: the first from someone experiencing symptoms characteristic to stress-induced panic attacks, and the second from a friend witnessing their friend in distress. The players begin by learning self-regulation strategies through minigames such as regulated breathing and neutral object fixation, and then shift to the bystander friend, who takes steps to remove stressful stimuli from their friend’s immediate environment until they can de-escalate their negative experience.

If you’d like to learn more about (or play) Veronica and Brandon’s 2021 XR Brain Jam projects, follow the links below!

https://vtheyoshi.itch.io/powrposr

https://tianyunwang0421.itch.io/cafe-serenitea

A Tale of Two Brandon’s: Voicing a Character in InvestiDate

p2p

On May 27th, I had the exciting opportunity to travel to Boston to visit friend and lab collaborator, Andrew Schartmann, to lend my voice to a non-playable character in InvestiDate, our new safe sex and healthy dating videogame for Black teen girls.

In InvestiDate, Brandon is a young Black college student in a committed relationship who provides advice to players on how to talk to partners about subjects that are sometimes difficult to navigate, like requesting and recognizing sexual consent, getting treated for an STI including HIV, and communicating openly and honestly with romantic partners about STI status and testing. Brandon offers what he knows or thinks about situations players encounter throughout the game like a protective older friend would, speaking from his own experience in the hope that the lessons he learned by making mistakes in his own dating life would be helpful for his younger friends. Writing Brandon’s character with the play4REAL team was a rewarding and somewhat introspective process. Partly rooted in conversations our team had with current Black teen girls about boys they know, partly rooted in my memories of the early years of college and vision of the kind of mentor I would have liked to call from time to time, Brandon was entirely new, yet felt grounded.

As I boarded the Amtrak, I imagined what it would be like embodying a younger, fictional version of myself through just a voice performance, which I had never really done before. I felt nervous about if the age gap between myself and my character would become apparent and read as inauthentic, or if my lack of experience voice recording would mean butchered lines, a bunch of unnecessary repeated takes and a frustrated Andrew. Still, I could not help but be excited to try my hand at recording and my first time working with someone on one of our projects in-person rather than through a webcam via Zoom. I never imagined that working on a behavioral intervention could mean sitting down in front of a microphone to record (and re-record) lines in the name of HIV/STI prevention.

Once I arrived at Andrew’s home and sat down in front of the microphone, my fears about the vocal performance aspect fell away, and after a few minutes testing the setup, we were off! Despite my initial concerns, the lines typically were not tough to record all the way through without mistakes, although some of the medical terms had me tongue-tied for one or two takes. Two hours, plenty of laughs, and a couple of pages of dialog later, we were finished, and I began my trip back to the other side of town to finish my day working on projects from a local café before booking my ticket back to New Haven.

That trip was one of several hidden highlights of my time working at play4REAL during the pandemic. I am incredibly grateful to have contributed to this project in a way I never expected, making this special memory in the process, and I cannot wait to play the finished game with everyone soon!

-Brandon Sands

2nd Year Research Associate

A Most Unexpected, Unprecedented Year: Brandon’s Look Back at One Year of play4REAL From Home

p2p

On March 10, 2020, I entered a new chapter of my time at play4REAL. The following week would make six months since walking into the Church Street building for the first time, a brand-new Nashville transplant eager to join my amazing team to start a research trial of Invite Only VR. What started as nervous passing whispers from teachers and students during daily visits to schools, became declarations from the CDC, and finally I learned that I would not be returning to my daily routine of data collection, follow-up with teachers and administrators and planning for two new projects back in the lab.

I never imagined that six months of daily meetings with the team would turn into more than a year of remote meetings over Zoom, collaborative web documents, and a careful dance of coordinated scheduling around time zones, wi-fi outages, and the other obstacles of remote research.  While the trials of remote collaboration have been humbling, it has been great to see us overcome challenges creatively together. 

For our vaping prevention study of Invite Only VR, we managed to move forward smoothly with follow-up surveys of students because our follow-up surveys were already completed online using students’ Google Chromebooks. With the help of teachers and administrators, we had great success in following most of the students enrolled in our study. Because we managed to keep the study moving forward, we managed to submit our findings less than six months after the end of data collection, while also publishing our preliminary research study findings. We also used the time to present our findings at virtual academic and game conferences over Zoom, making sure that we shared our insights with the community despite the restrictions placed on in-person gatherings.

For our development of One Night Stan, we worried that our game development process would be hindered by holding brainstorming meetings and focus groups with Black teen girls exclusively over Zoom.  What surprised me was how the switch to Zoom was, by that point, a comfortable way for teens to talk to each other, and Zoom chat was also helpful in letting our participants share information they may not otherwise have felt comfortable sharing to the larger group. Also, while the nationwide demonstrations against police brutality were very emotionally heavy, we were able to uncover a more comprehensive understanding of what barriers, fears, and sources of resilience Black teen girls found through their lived experience, and the richness of their reported experience led us to pursue two qualitative research papers while also enriching and grounding our game content. While COVID-19 precautions have delayed our schedule for testing our game with teens, we are using this time to prepare to start testing as soon as it is safe to do so.

For our development of No Time Wasted, I figured it would be difficult to test the game prototype for the Magic Leap One and work with the team to create a rich story that made creative use of the capabilities of AR technology, but again I was pleasantly surprised to find out how capable were of meeting that challenge. While we are not able to safely use the AR lenses to test our game with teens, we are looking forward to beginning that process when safety precautions allow.

While our team has had to make the tough decision to postpone some of the in-person joys of working at play4REAL, like meeting with teachers, students, game developers, conference attendees, I’m happy to say that the past year, despite all its challenges, has been a great one to work at play4REAL.

-Brandon Sands

2nd Year Research Associate at play4REAL

PlayCafe 2020

p2p

Play Cafe: Are you Game? An Event hosted by The Yale Center for Health & Learning Games

On March 8th, the team had the pleasure of entertaining a gang of 23 kids in our ever-popular annual event, the PlayCafe! This is a special event in the Yale Pathways to Science series for kids in grades 6-8.

We partnered with our sister lab, play2PREVENT, and had a group of 8 kids playing smokeSCREEN on iPads, a group of 8 kids playing Invite Only VR on Oculus Gos, and lastly a group of 8 kids either playing or watching others play Beat Saber on the Oculus Quest! Needless to say, our whole office was crawling with kiddos! We had them playing in the offices, we had them in the lobby, we had them in the hall, we even had them in the kitchen!

These activities allowed our visitors to have the chance to learn about the work we create in the Yale Center for Health and Learning Games, but also to experience some of the best of VR. We think Beat Saber on the Quest is a great and approachable way to showcase VR for all ages. There were some really experienced Beat Saber players competing with each other to get the highest score, and some kids who had never before tried VR but were still having an absolute blast in Beat Saber’s No Fail mode.

At the end of the day, we wrote down everyone’s best score on the eponymous song, “Beat Saber,” and gave out one of our limited edition Invite Only T-shirts as a prize to our highest scoring kid.

One thing that struck us this year was that most of the kids had tried VR at least once, and many of them in fact owned their own headsets. This was a pretty striking difference from previous years when most people had only tried VR demos, if that. Next year we hope to break out our new Alcohol Prevention/Harm Reduction game and again wow the kids with new technology–the Magic Leap!

A Visit to the Innovation Lab

p2p

As makers of serious games, hearing about teens working on their own meaningful game projects is music to our ears. Students at Western Middle School are developing serious games on a huge range of topics: pollution in the Long Island Sound, teen body image, videogame addiction (very meta), suicide prevention, and even the death penalty. The play4REAL XR Lab Team recently had the opportunity to visit with these talented kids to share our game development process and learn about theirs.

Students participate in a mock focus group to learn how the play4REAL Team gathers information to inform our games.

All the magic is happening in the Innovation Lab, headed by Mr. Gaspare Lipari, where kids at Western Middle have access to all the coolest VR and AR tech, generously supported by the Greenwich Alliance for Education. We kicked off our visit to the Innovation Lab with a presentation about how we created Invite Only VR, starting with focus group research, moving on to script writing, voice acting, and countless iterations from prototype all the way to final product. After our intro, we split the large group of 30 kids into three groups so that they could all take turns playing Invite Only VR, participating in mock focus groups, and pitching their game idea–Shark Tank Style–to members of our team.

Brandon Sands helps Innovation Lab members perfect their Shark Tank game pitches.

The visit was an absolute blast and we can’t wait to hear more about these projects as they evolve! Thanks to The Innovation Lab, Western Middle, and the Greenwich Alliance for Education for putting together the event. It was a wonderful beginning to an exciting new collaboration!

Virtual Reality in the Classroom

p2p

Original post can be found here as a guest blog for #slowchathealth

Virtual reality isn’t coming to the health classroom….it’s already here, and it might be the most engaging and realistic teaching experience that you aren’t currently using. I recently asked teachers for health education predictions and I’m predicting that VR technology is eventually going to become commonplace, but are you ready for it? This week’s blog post considers this and comes from Kimberly Hieftje, PhD, is a Research Scientist at the Yale School of Medicine Director of the play4REAL Lab at the center, which focuses on the use of VR/AR/XR in games.

Ahead of the Game

Invite Only VR: A Virtual Reality Game for Vaping Prevention

In August of this year, I wrote a blog about bringing VR to the classrooms.  My takeaway? There are some really great educational games and experiences that use virtual reality (VR), but not many schools have access to the technology to implement them in their classrooms. Seeing the need for vaping prevention interventions, I recently joined a Health Educators group on Facebook and posted about our VR vaping prevention game, Invite Only VR.  I was thrilled by the excitement and interest from teachers but also disheartened to realize that most teachers just didn’t have access to the VR headsets needed to use the game. This has been wearing on me – I am a huge supporter of using game technology for learning and skill-building, but how do we get these great experiences in the hands of teachers and students? I don’t know the answer to this question, btw, so I’m putting it out there. I know this blog reaches many health educators, and your thoughts are invaluable.

For background, our lab (the play4REAL XR Lab at Yale) has been working on the development and evaluation of Invite Only VR for the past two years. This week was a good week – we wrapped up enrollment and gameplay with 291 7th and 8th grade students! Our next steps are to follow these students for the rest of the school year, collecting data along the way. Our big question – can playing a virtual reality video game change attitudes, intentions, and behaviors related to vaping? I believe it can.

Invite Only VR was developed for the Oculus Go and is free to download on the Oculus Store. In this engaging, story-based game, the player must navigate different types of peer pressure, including the pressure to vape (specifically JUUL) in various social situations such as in the school bathroom, in the back of a classroom, and at a party. Invite Only VR was developed by teens FOR teens – teens from all over Connecticut helped us to design the game, write the narrative, and even did the voice acting!

It takes about 90 minutes to complete the game, and covers topics such as: 1) general knowledge about vaping/JUUL, chemicals and flavors, 2) health and safety concerns related to vaping/JUUL, 3) the harmful effects of nicotine and nicotine addition, 4) legal aspects related to owning, using, and selling vaping products, including JUUL and JUUL pods, and 5)social media and marking influence of tobacco companies and others on teen’s attitudes and behaviors. We also have a teacher guide available on our website to facilitate discussions during and after gameplay.

Beyond the learning goals of Invite Only VR, we have also included several opportunities for real-time skill-building in the game. For instance, the game uses voice recognition software to allow players to verbally respond to characters (from pre-selected choices) and practice refusal skills. The player can choose different ways to refuse characters in risky situations by choosing to make a joke, make an excuse, change the subject, or suggest an alternative.  We wanted to provide the player with the opportunity to say no, but in a way that left them feeling in control.  Besides, we know that saying no to a close friend may look different than saying no to the cool upperclassman that you are hoping to impress.

In my opinion, the game is pretty cool. And perhaps we are ahead of the game in many ways. But, I also like to think we are adding to the dearth of experiential, skill-based learning experiences for health education that are greatly needed.  In a few years, perhaps that gap will close and VR game-based interventions like Invite Only VR will be readily accessible for teachers.

For now, if you or your school is one of the lucky ones to have access to Oculus Go’s, please download our game from the Oculus store (for free!) and let me know what you think! Or, if you just want to reach out and give me your thoughts, I’d also love to hear from you – play4real@yale.edu.

Oh, and please follow us on Facebook and Twitter!  @play4rlab and @khieftje 

We are doing really cool stuff and creating more experiences around health education! Our next project, an augmented reality (AR) experience for teens on alcohol use prevention/harm reduction!

 

ABOUT ME:

Kimberly Hieftje, PhD, is a Research Scientist at the Yale School of Medicine Director of the play4REAL Lab at the center, which focuses on the use of VR/AR/XR in games. She is currently involved in the development and testing of several health behavior change video games and has published frequently on developing, evaluating, and implementing serious games. She has worked on games that have focused on topics including JUUL/e-c-cigarette prevention, tobacco use prevention, risk reduction in adolescents, HIV/STI prevention, HIV/STI testing, empowering young women around sexual health, bystander intervention, LGBTQ bullying, school climate, and increasing math skills in first graders.

Most recently, Dr. Hieftje received a gift from Oculus to fully develop and evaluate Invite Only VR, a VR video game intervention focused on JUUL/e-cigarette prevention in teens developed by the play4REAL Lab in partnership with PreviewLabs, Inc. Created for the Oculus Go, the game uses voice recognition software to allow players to practice refusing peers in real time. With her team at the play4REAL Lab, she will conduct a randomized controlled trial with 230 teens, following them for six months to see if playing Invite Only VR impacted their behaviors, attitudes, intentions, and social perceptions of JUUL/e-cigarettes. Additionally, the team will explore how VR can be leveraged to create the feeling of social pressure in simulated high-risk social situations involving peers.

Dr. Hieftje is also a K12 Scholar in the Yale Implementation Science program (YSIS), where she will collect and analyze qualitative and quantitative data from teachers and students on the implementation of a web-based video game intervention focused on tobacco use prevention with the goal of better understanding the factors associated with successful implementation of video games in schools.

Do you want to join our team?

p2p

Are you looking to join a team on a mission to make videogames that make difference? Well we have been looking for YOU!

The play4REAL XR Lab at the Yale Center for Health & Learning Games seeks a highly-motivated Postgraduate Associate with appropriate experience in video game research, healthcare, behavioral or cognitive psychology, health behavior, sexual health, or public health to support several videogame projects. The individual in this position will gain hands-on experience and training through their participation in the development and testing of a 2D multiplayer game for adolescent girls with grant funding from the NIH. The individual in this position will also have the opportunity to participate in and coordinate community-building events and activities at the play4REAL Lab with a focus on applying AR/VR technology.

The successful candidate will work in close collaboration with the play4REAL team and videogame developers, participating in all phases of the research project: conceptualization and development of the multiplayer videogame; recruitment of subjects for focus group/playtesting; design and implementation of subsequent randomized controlled trial; data collection; management and analysis; writing up results; and presenting findings. This one-year, full-time position offers the opportunity to work alongside a prolific group of game researchers, but requires creativity, excellent written and verbal communication skills, and a strong interest in intellectual collaboration with a multi-disciplinary team.

Position beginning March/April, 2020, materials should be submitted no later than February 15, 2020.

To apply, candidates are requested to emailing the following to Kimberly Hieftje:

  • A short letter of interest outlining your suitability for the position
  • Curriculum Vitae or Resume
  • 3 names of references

NPR Segment on Invite Only VR

p2p

With data collection well underway for the randomized controlled trial of Invite Only VR: A Vaping Prevention Game, the play4REAL team got a special visit from NPR!

Health reporter Nicole Leonard met us at one of our middle school sites to chat with our participants and capture the auditory ambiance of 15 young teens playing a VR game about the dangers of vaping. Since Invite Only VR uses the Oculus Go’s on board microphone and voice recognition software, kids across the room were using their in-game knowledge power to correct their virtual peers and calling out things like “Actually, JUUL is an e-cigarette! JUUL is just the name of the brand” or “People have been burned or poisoned just by touching the liquid from an e-cigarette pod. I wouldn’t touch it if I were you!” In addition to these scripted prompts for vocalizations during game play, we have noticed that players enjoy calling out to their real life friends how far they are in the Space Cats minigame–what level they are on and how many lives they have left. There was no shortage of such exclamations for Nicole to capture during her visit!

Two participants in our RCT beat the game while Nicole was making her recording rounds, and both of them were awesome enough to spend a few minutes to talk about their impression of the experience. The NPR segment is live! Listen to it here to find out what kids are saying about Invite Only VR!

Bringing VR to the Classroom: Teacher Professional Development Session

p2p

 

The play4REAL Lab kicked off its very first teacher training session with the Milford Public Schools last week! We brought 12 headsets and introduced VR to teachers from across disciplines to showcase how VR could be integrated in their lesson plans. Teachers were blown away by the possibilities, and all of them really seemed to enjoy the chance to try out the new technology.

In our development session we talked about 5 advantages of using VR in education:

  • Better Sense of Place: With VR students aren’t limited to descriptions or textbook illustrations. They can explore a topic first hand and learn about scale and spatial relationships. This works just as well for molecules and proteins in biology and chemistry as it does for Egyptian pyramids and 18th century tall ships in social studies and history!
  • Democratize and Scale Learning Oportunities: VR lets students experience things they might not otherwise have access to. Virtual field trips to anywhere on earth can happen in the time it takes to boot up a headset with a fraction of the cost and oversight. How but through the magic of VR would middle schoolers get a chance to visit the International Space Station?!
  • Learn by Doing: VR can provide a concrete experience to anchor textbook instruction. Students practice their public speaking in a safe (virtual) environment in Virtualspeech VR Courses
  • Inspire Creativity: In an emerging technology like VR, students have a unique chance to create new forms of digital art like nothing they have ever experienced before. Not to mention learn valuable skills like 3D modeling in a hands on way.
  • Empathy and Perspective Taking: The verdict is in–taking the first person perspective of others in virtual reality produces more empathy and prosocial behaviors when compared to traditional perspective-taking tasks. It is an exciting new way for students to learn about the lives of people with backgrounds very different than their own.

The play4REAL lab will soon be releasing an Educators’ Guide to Educational Apps available for the Oculus Go. Stay Tuned!

Creating a promo video for a VR game

p2p
Written by Kelley Van Dilla of Van Dilla Videography

Hi! My name is Kelley Van Dilla and I’m a professional film director, editor, and immersive experience designer. I’ve also loved playing video games since I was little.

As a close friend of Dr. Veronica Weser’s, it’s been really exciting to follow her work and research with VR and perception. I love being able to try out the latest VR tech, participate in her studies, and play through innovative games together.I also love trailers. Movie trailers, video game trailers, u-haul trailers. Well, maybe not the last one, though they are useful. I probably watch way more movie trailers than watch the actual movies. Same with video games. That being said, I’ve never worked on a trailer before, so I was really excited when Dr. Weser asked me to create the promo video for Invite Only VR.

First, I watched as many clips as possible (normally I would have loved to play the game myself, but my travel schedule prevented me) and then I asked myself a few questions, the most prominent being “how do I show enough to intrigue viewers without making them feel like they’ve already seen everything?” This is always a difficult question, and something I constantly think about when watching film and video game trailers. Most of the following questions follow from this; how do I communicate the story without spoiling it? What gameplay should I show while leaving room for surprises? What are the key features and how do I communicate them clearly?

That last one proved difficult for this project, and I think it’s unique to VR. It’s an entirely different experience to play a VR game, because of how immersive it is to have the camera and gameplay respond directly to one’s bodily movement. Turning my head to look at something instantly makes me feel like I’m part of the world when I play VR games – in a way that I don’t experience in any other media format. Unfortunately a traditional, 2-D trailer can’t communicate this, so I had to figure out how to make the game look as exciting and intriguing as possible.

Luckily the game has some really great features that make it super compelling. Voice recognition, a groundhog-day like structure, pro-social interactions and information, and of course, Space Cats!

I hope you enjoy the trailer as much as I enjoyed making it. I can’t wait for the positive change that will come of this game!