Designing an Educational Game Facilitating Children’s Understanding of the Development of Social Relationships Using IVAs with Social Group Dynamics

Social relationships are fundamentally important to humans. Children are born into a family social structure and gradually they become part of a wider social structure including peers, in which each individual’s relationships are affected by other relationships. To most people expressing appropriate non-verbal social behaviours when interacting with others in a virtual environment (VE) is natural and effortless as they do so daily in the physical world. There is a minority group, such as people diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorder, who encounter difficulties when carrying out this task because of impairments of specific skills regarding social communication and communication [1]. In this paper, we study the design of a system using advanced VE and IVA technologies with the goal to help children with autism to explore and better understand social dynamics occurring in social networks involving groups of people.