Effects of an Immersive, Multilinear Future Scenario for Education Purposes

This paper proposes a didactic design that is centered around an immersive, multilinear narrative in virtual reality as a means of illustrating human life on the edge of technological singularity. It explores the potential of narrative scenarios to trigger a discourse from users' perspective. Affective Computing is taken as a use case. It is a subfield of AI that focuses on identifying, understanding, and appropriately responding to human emotions. Its goal is to create more personalized and emotionally engaging human-machine interactions. To explore what life might be like if an emotionally intelligent AI became our best friend, a multilinear scenario was created. This scenario takes the reader through different stages of the protagonist's life, starting from the first day of secondary school and ending with the loss of a loved one in midlife. The systematic approach to create and validate the multilinear interactive scenario is described and the results of an experiment with 164 participants are presented. The ultimate goal is the application of this approach for educational purposes regarding ethical thinking and responsible innovations. [For the full proceedings, see ED636095.]