November 17, 2020

XR-EMAR: Moving EMAR into a virtual environment

In the last of Project EMAR’s three summer studies, the team developed and tested an online application called XR-EMAR where adolescents could interact with a 3D social robot prototype.

Thanks to the customizability of XR-EMAR, teens created their own environments and EMAR robots. From placing EMAR in the middle of the ocean to adding animals or floating bridges, teens got to design their own virtual experience with EMAR right from their desktop at home using Co-Spaces, an easy-to-use, educational 3D creation platform!

 

“It’s futuristic and also like a winter wonderland. And so like it combines my favorite things in one environment,” a teen commented in a design session.

 

Most teens constructed outdoor environments for its calming effect and emphasized the addition of water because it felt comforting. Overall, undergraduate researchers Simran Bhatia and Tanya Budhiraja found that XR-EMAR provides an “escape from reality” element, especially during the coronavirus pandemic, and can be incredibly useful for rapid prototyping for teen-robot interactions.