Emotional challenge and its prospective applications in metaverse
With the development of natural human-computer interaction technologies,such as virtual reality(VR),meta-verse,and artificial intelligence-generated content,human-computer interfaces based on interactive virtual contents are providing users with a new kind of task challenge——emotional challenge.Emotional challenge mainly examines the user's ability to understand,explore,and deal with emotional issues in a virtual world.It is considered a core aspect of virtual interactive scenarios in the metaverse and an essential element in the future digital world.Moreover,users'perceived emo-tional challenge has been proven to be a serious,profound,and reflective new type of user experience.Specifically,by resolving the tension within the narrative,identifying with virtual characters,and exploring emotional ambiguities,players encountering emotional challenge would be put in a more reflective state of mind and experience more diverse,impactful,and complex emotional experiences.Since the introduction of emotional challenge in 2015,it has attracted considerable attention in the field of human-computer interaction.With this background,researchers have conducted a series of research work on emotional challenge with respect to its definition,characteristics,interactive design,evaluation scales,and computational modeling.This study aims to systematically organize and introduce the related works of emotional chal-lenge first and then elaborate its prospective applications in the metaverse.This paper starts by introducing the concept of challenge in digital games.Game challenge deals with the obstacles that players must overcome and the tasks that they must perform to make game progress.Game challenges generally have three different kinds.Physical challenge depends on players'skills,such as speed,accuracy,endurance,dexterity,and strength,and cognitive challenge requires players to use their cognitive abilities,such as memory,observation,reasoning,planning,and problem solving.By contrast,emo-tional challenge deals with tension within the narrative or difficult material presented in the game and can only be overcome with a cognitive and affective effort from the player.Afterward,this paper introduces related works on emotional challenge,including how it differs from more traditional types of challenge,the diverse and relative negative emotional responses it evokes,the required game design characteristics,and the psychological theories relate to emotional challenge.This paper then introduces how emotional challenge affects player experience when separately from or jointly with traditional challenge in VR and PC conditions.Results showed that relatively exclusive emotional challenge induced a wider range of different emotions under VR and PC conditions,while the adding of emotional challenge broadened emotional responses only in VR condition.VR could also enhance players'perceived experiences of emotional response,appreciation,immersion,and presence.This paper also reviewed the latest work on the potential of detecting perceived emotional challenge from physi-ological signals.Researchers collected physiological responses from a group of players who engaged in three typical game scenarios coving an entire spectrum of different game challenges.By collecting perceived challenge ratings from players and extracting basic physiological features,researchers applied multiple machine learning methods and metrics to detect challenge experiences.Results showed that most methods achieved a challenge detection accuracy of around 80％.Although emotional challenge has attracted considerable attention in the field of human-computer interaction,it has not been clearly defined at present.Additionally,current research on emotional challenge is primarily limited to the area of digital games.We believe that the concept of emotional challenge has the potential for application in various domains of human-computer interaction.Therefore,building upon previous works on emotional challenge,this paper provides a defini-tion and description of emotional challenge from the perspective of human-computer interaction.Emotional challenge pri-marily examines users'understanding,exploration,and processing abilities of emotions in virtual scenarios and the digital world.It often requires individuals to engage in meaningful choices and interactions within virtual interactive environments as they navigate emotional dilemmas and respond to the uncertainties arising from their interactions.For instance,in a vir-tual scenario,a sniper aims at an enemy soldier holding a rocket launcher,intending to destroy their own camp.However,the sniper suddenly realizes that the enemy soldier is a close friend with whom they have shared hardships.When faced with the decision of whether to pull the trigger,the sniper may experience an emotional challenge of"agonizing between friendship and protecting their own base".With the proposed definition of emotional challenge,we also elaborate on how emotional challenge is understood from the perspectives of users and designers and highlight the main mediums through which emotional challenge exists.Finally,this paper summarizes the research importance of emotional challenge in the metaverse and provides an outlook on the application prospects of emotional challenge in the metaverse.The metaverse aims to create a comprehensive virtual digital living space that maps or transcends the real world.It includes a plethora of virtual content and virtual characters,with users being a part of it and interacting with these virtual characters or content.Through autonomous interactions with the virtual characters or content,users are likely to explore complex emotions and confront with emotional challenge.Hence,emotional challenge becomes the core content embedded in virtual interactive scenarios within the metaverse,making it an essential element in the future digital world.In the design of metaverse sys-tems for application,the involvement of emotional challenge can equip the metaverse with the ability to evoke and generate complex but meaningful emotional experiences.It can assist in training users'skills in understanding,exploring,and deal-ing with difficult emotional issues,promoting self-realization,self-expression,and self-management abilities and thus building correct life outlook and values.
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