Impact of empathy of mapping the audience’s body posture on virtual character in interactive public service advertisement

Abstract

Interactive public service advertisements (PSA) have been suggested to promote engagement of the public. However, there is a lack of research and limited approach, putting viewers in the third-person view. To explore interactive PSA and its potential values, the paper takes the strategies of the serious game, which puts the user in the victim's point of view, by mapping the audience's body movement to that of virtual characters in PSA. Under the three scenarios of domestic child abuse, secondhand smoking, and animal cosmetic experiment, the paper designed embodied interactive PSAs in the context of in-front-of the display, where subtle, medium, and strong embodiment is applied. The developed PSA created based on the designer workshop and through iterations, examines the impact on the participant's cognitive and behavior change. The paper states the influence of characteristics of the PSA topic and its subject, human or non-human, on participant's empathic experience. The research examines the potential of subtle embodiment and suggestions on design considerations to increment the effect, especially empathy, of the embodied interactive PSA.