Responsive virtual environments
David Zeltzer, Rita K. Addison · Communications of the ACM · 1997
Responsive and emphatic awareness is known to facilitate and enhance numerous human activities, especially learning and therapy. Empathy, moreover, has been described as a clinical skill, fundamental to all areas of the medical profession. Empathic awareness allows one to enter the private perceptual world of another and to become thoroughly at home in it. Empathic therapists allow their clients to feel valued and understood, and thus to talk more freely and to listen more carefully to themselves. The notion of empathy is central to the architecture of the therapeutic virtual environments (VE). Three forms of computational empathy can be identified as: the Synthetic Other - the urge to create a being in the image with whom one can communicate and interact in meaningful ways forms the basis of a long and rich store of human legend, including the Golem and Frankenstein monsters, and the HAL 9000 computer, all of which can be considered caricatures of human agents; the Responsive VE - which is a persona-less environment, a dynamic, emerging, participant-driven VE leading to heightened sensitivity and awareness of one's experience.