Advancing Ethical Decision Making in Virtual Reality
Project Overview
Sin-Hwa Kang, Jake Chanenson, Peter Cowal, Madeleine Weaver, Pranav Ghate, David M. Krum
MxR Lab, University of Southern California
To test the effect of fidelity and immersion of an augmented reality environment on ethical decision-making, we created a virtual environment where the user would play a role in the trolley problem. My individual contribution was designing and fabricating a physical lever using a motorcycle damper to enable the discrete control of the stiffness of the lever. The lever was outfitted with motion trackers to enable the realistic motion of a corresponding virtual lever. I also 3D modeled several scene components like hard hats and vests in Blender..
Individual Contributions: Designed and built physical lever and corresponding virtual lever with the use of a motorcycle damper in mind to enable discrete variability in lever stiffness. Designed many high-fidelity virtual objects used in the scene, including hard hats and construction vests.
Awarded "Best Poster Honorable Mention" at IEEE VR 2019 Osaka
Overview of Virtual Objects
To create our high-fidelity environment, we included objects with sound effects, realistic character animations, context appropriate character props and virtual objects that realistically represented their physical counterparts.
Assembled Environment
Pictured here is the assmebled environment from the point of view of a user wearing VR goggles. The user can pull the lever to decide to sacrifice themselves or sacrifice the workers on the other train track. The user's perspective can shift in several different modes. In one mode the user is driving the train, in another the user is on the ground but further away from the track, and so on.
The environment was used in subsequent experiments carried out by the Mixed Reality Lab at USC to test user's responses to an ethical dilemma within a virtual environment. The project also won 'Best Poster Honorable Mention' at IEEE VR 2019.
