VR Empathy Game "Why Did Baba Take My Brother?"

This research project is about using virtual reality technologies for developing empathy in young children. 

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Here is 3 minutes video about the VR Empathy Game.

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The Virtual Reality (VR) educational game “Why Did Baba Yaga Take My Brother?” aims to support empathy development and understanding of social interactions in young children. The game brings a player to the world of a fairy tale “The Magic Swan Geese” and encourages them to reflect on characters’ emotions through dialog with characters, watching character’s memories and perspectives. Use of VR for children’s games allows designers to create realistic immersive experiences, which can help a player to experience a stronger empathetic response. Innovative This VR Empathy Game creates a safe exploratory world of immersive and realistic empathy experiences for young children. The game is designed for children of 5 to 8 years old as a potential extracurricular activity at school or at home.

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If you want to playtest the game, here is the link to the game build. 

Just download this file to your Oculus Quest 2 device. You might want to use the SideQuest application to do so. 

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Shield: 

This Game is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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Mobile Game "The Magic Swan Geese"

This research project explores how computer games can be developed to engage young children in critical discussions of cultural awareness and empathy in or out of classrooms. In order to answer the question “How can we expose children to different cultures and help them develop cultural awareness and empathy?” we are building a computer game for young children (5 to 7 years old) based on a Russian traditional fairy tale “The Magic Swan Geese.” As a framework for designing the game, we draw on research on computer game design, early childhood development, and fairy tales literature. Through creating a pilot game we will test the feasibility of translating the theory of the design framework for into practice. This paper presents the design framework, the design of the game, and data from this on-going research and development project.

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All the game elements and the game characters were made from clay. We used a claymation style to animate this game.

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Here is the video for the game introduction scene.