Scenario-based Immersive Virtual Reality Platform for Testing Empathy Types: A Development Study

Empathy skills are required for understanding and responding to others’ emotions. Traditional instruments for testing a person’s empathy type lack immersion and contain recall bias. In this development study, we presented the technical foundations of Virtual Reality Empathy Test (VRET), an immersive virtual reality (IVR) platform that tests users’ empathy type through interactive scenarios and related questions. The questions are based on the Multidimensional Empathy Scale for Adolescents. VRET determines the user’s empathy type along three dimensions of empathy: cognitive-affective, positive-negative, and majority-minority. Furthermore, we presented the results of a usability and user experience evaluation of VRET in which 99 Korean adolescents (47 females, 49 males, and three others, ages 15–17) answered a mixed-method post-experiment questionnaire. The results indicated a good overall usability with issues in complex technology setup, virtual characters, scenarios, interactions, and cybersickness. Moreover, we identified several affordances, such as the ability to test one’s empathy type, superiority over paper-based tests, high immersion, realism, situatedness, fun, interest, and novelty. Furthermore, we conducted a technical performance evaluation, which showed steady performance with a mean frame rate of about 90. The results of this study contribute to the growing body of literature on the human-computer interaction aspects of utilizing IVR in psychology. The architectural design of VRET opens opportunities for the collection of multimodal data and the utilization of immersive scenario-based content in other application areas.