Toward a Shared Experience of Uncertainty of Interpersonal Communication Through an Immersive Virtual Reality Serious Game

Ordinary life without uncertainty is unimaginable. Uncertainty is experienced daily almost by everybody in tasks such as choosing, and solving problems, and mostly it appears in the context of interpersonal communications. Past research highlights that perceived uncertainty of information in a communication system has high effects on the quality of information transfer between sender and receiver and may follow cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses in people involved. In this paper, we extend the previous work of the authors. Similar to the previous work the aim is to create an enjoyable experience supporting the investigation of how different levels of uncertainty affect the ways participants manage uncertain features of interpersonal communications in a workplace scenario, but this time they are accompanied by an assistant. In the design of our proposed system we create uncertainty of interpersonal communications in terms of ambiguity, probability, and complexity. We also report the result of a within-subject user study with 6 participants aged between 20 and 40, and their behavioral responses to two levels of uncertainty with subjective and objective measures. Through our study, we found that the proposed application successfully created a pleasant experience, received good usability evaluation scores from the participants, and meaningfully measured some behavioral responses related to exposure to different levels of uncertainty in this social experience.