Abstract: What happens to people inside virtual worlds is not an accident of technology. It is a consequence of design decisions: whose voice an avatar speaks with, what color it wears, how the world responds to a keystroke. In this talk I present a decade of controlled experiments, often with more than a thousand players inside real games my lab builds, showing that seemingly small design decisions systematically change motivation, performance, and learning. I trace three threads: avatars and identity (why hearing your own voice in a game changes how you play), feedback and juice (what actually makes rich audiovisual feedback motivating), and virtual reality for learning (from tutorial design to a robotics assembly experiment testing how much help VR should give). I close with where the program is heading.

Bio: Dominic Kao is an Assistant Professor in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he directs the Virtual Futures Lab. His research asks how virtual worlds shape the people who use them: how avatars and identity, feedback design, and virtual reality change motivation, performance, and learning. His lab builds its own games and VR systems and runs controlled experiments inside them, with more than 30,000 study participants to date. Before academia, he worked as a game developer at Electronic Arts. His work has been recognized with an NSF CAREER Award, a Best Paper Award from ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems, and Honorable Mentions at CHI and CHI PLAY. He received his PhD in Computer Science from MIT.

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IPaT: GVU Lunch Lecture Series