WizardOfVR: Emotion-Adaptive Virtual Wizard Experience

Description: We demonstrate WizardOfVR, a personalized emotion-adaptive virtual reality (VR) Wizard akin to the Harry Potter experience, highlighting a use-case scenario of a real-time biofeedback loop between the user's emotional state and adaptive VR environments (VREs) using off-the-shelf physiological sensors.

Presenter(s):
Kunal Gupta, University of Auckland, Empathic Computing Lab, New Zealand
Yuewei Zhang, University of Auckland, Empathic Computing Lab, New Zealand
Yun Suen Pai, Keio University Graduate School of Media Design, Japan
Mark Billinghurst, University of Auckland, Empathic Computing Lab, New Zealand

Kunal Gupta is a Ph.D. candidate at the Empathic Computing Laboratory, University of Auckland, New Zealand, under the supervision of Prof. Mark Billinghurst. His research revolves around emotion recognition in VR using physiological and contextual information. Prior to this, he worked as a UX Researcher at Google and as UX Designer at a startup in India, for a total of around 5 years of industry experience. He obtained a master's degree in HCI from HITLab NZ supervised by Prof Billinghurst. He conducted some of the first research into the use of eye-gaze to enhance remote collaboration in wearable AR systems.

Yuewei Zhang is an XR developer and enthusiast who has been creating commercial VR games since 2016. He is currently studying at the University of Auckland as a 2nd-year undergraduate Software Engineering student. Yuewei aims to be at the forefront of developing virtual reality applications. He enjoys experimenting with creating interactive media only possible in XR, whether that be art, games, or research, and their empathic outcome. Areas he is working on at the moment include finding novel ways of incorporating storytelling, music, and creative programming into extended reality.

Yun Suen Pai is currently an assistant professor at the Embodied Media Laboratory, Keio University Graduate School of Media Design. He obtained his Bachelor's Degree in Computer-Aided Design and Manufacturing Engineering, as well as Masters Degree in Engineering Sciences at the University of Malaya, Malaysia. Then, he proceeded to obtain his Ph.D. in Media Design at Keio University, Japan, and furthered his postdoc research at the Empathic Computing Laboratory, Auckland, New Zealand. His research interest is the effects of VR/AR/MR towards human behavior, perception, and learning using physiological signals and artificial intelligence

Mark Billinghurst is Director of the Empathic Computing Laboratory, and Professor at the University of South Australia in Adelaide, Australia, and at the University of Auckland in Auckland, New Zealand. He earned a PhD in 2002 from the University of Washington and conducts research on how virtual and real worlds can be merged, publishing over 600 papers on Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Empathic Computing, and related topics. In 2013 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand, and in 2019 was given the ISMAR Career Impact Award for lifetime contribution to AR research and commercialization.