Addressing Sexist Attitudes On A College Campus Through Virtual Role-Play With Digital Doppelgangers

Digital doppelgangers are virtual humans that highly resemble the real self but behave independently. Digital doppelgangers possess great potential to serve as powerful models for behavioral change. An emerging technology, the Rapid Avatar Capture and Simulation (RACAS) system, enables low-cost and high-speed scanning of a human user and creation of a digital doppelganger that is a fully animatable virtual 3D model of the user. We designed a virtual role-playing game, DELTA, that implements a powerful cognitive dissonance-based paradigm for attitudinal and behavioral change, and integrated it with digital doppelgangers to influence a human user's attitude towards sexism on college campuses. In this paper, we discuss the design and evaluation the RACAS system and the DELTA game-based environment. Results indicate the potential impact of the DELTA game-based environment in creating an immersive virtual experience for attitudinal change.