How do curiosity and attention deploy in 3D space and what does it mean for VR?
Attention and Curiosity play a key role in the guidance of behavior and skill acquisition. But how do you measure these processes, and how do they come together in a learning context? Can the controlled environment that VR enables play a role here? And what are the exact parameters for efficient learning?
These sorts of questions are what ABC-Space is all about. This SNSF-supported project which runs from 2024 to 2028, combines the expertise of LABNIC, TECFA and Artanim to try and find answers by exploring these concepts in three building blocks:
- Attention in 3D Space – how do we obtain reliable indices of attention in VR and a refined understanding of the underlying cognitive mechanisms?
- Curiosity in Naturalistic Environments – how do we measure how curiosity drives behavior and determine how it may boost or hamper memory in VR?
- Virtual social interaction through physics-based characters – how do more physically interactive characters offer a benefit to educational VR scenarios, and to what extent do their social cues affect spatial attention?
At Artanim, we focus on the development of physics-based controllers to control virtual reality characters and contribute to the design of behavioural experiments to validate their impact in terms of attention and learning. We further leverage our production expertise to create the VR environments and the characters within them to support the various studies.
More info: https://artanim.ch/project/abc-space