Fostering Emotional Perspective-Taking: An Exploration of Affective Face-Tracking Interactions in the VR Narrative Rekindle
For VR narrative designers, this work explores a novel use of face-tracking to influence emotional connection, but it is an early-stage proposal without empirical validation.
The authors propose an affective interaction model using VR face-tracking to recognize player emotions and foster emotional perspective-taking with a story character, aiming to deepen narrative engagement. No concrete results are reported.
Interest in leveraging emotions in Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN) has been growing, and Virtual Reality (VR) offers rich access to real-time biometric data such as facial expressions; yet this capability remains underexplored in novel IDN design. Existing approaches typically treat emotion input superficially, such as adjusting system difficulty or aesthetics, but rarely influence how players experience the narrative itself. Prior work also lacks a focus on a specific authored narrative. We propose an experimental affective interaction model that uses a VR headset's built-in face-tracking capability to recognize player emotional states, fostering "emotional perspective-taking" between the player and their embodied story character, thereby deepening the player's emotional connection to the character and their narrative engagement with the VR experience.