The recipient of the 2021 award for the outstanding doctoral dissertation completed at a Canadian university in the field of Human-Computer Interaction is Dr. Xin Tong.
Dr. Tong’s dissertation, Bodily Resonance: Exploring the Effects of Virtual Embodiment on Pain Modulation and the Fostering of Empathy toward Pain Sufferers, combines both technical and human aspects of research to explore how virtual embodiment through the use of virtual reality technology can affect people’s perception of pain and address the biological, psychological and social challenges that chronic pain patients face. Dr. Tong first investigated how avatar features such as movements of virtual arms modulate virtual embodiment and pain. This step in the research was achieved through a combination of literature review, controlled lab studies and longitudinal studies that relied on technical implementations. Dr. Tong then built on these foundations that focused on chronic patients themselves to study in a second step how embodied avatars can stimulate non-patients’ empathy towards chronic pain patients. This was achieved by designing and implementing a VR game prototype that made it possible to study the extent to which such a game can improve non-patients’ empathy towards chronic pain patients.
Findings from Dr. Tong’s studies result in a series of important design recommendations for using embodied VR to generate empathy. This work identifies factors that impact the effect of embodiment on pain, including features of avatars, combinations of multiple modalities to communicate pain, and the integration of narratives into games. Building on those results, Dr. Tong proposes Bodily Resonance, a design framework for pain and VR for empathy. The framework connects the real body that is in pain, the VR content, the illusion of presence in the virtual world and the narrative, to mediate the perception of pain and empathy. The research presented in this dissertation will inform future research and applications concerned with modulating pain; beyond pain specifically, it will inform the design of VR applications that aim at generating empathy.
Dr. Xin Tong is currently an Assistant Professor in Computation and Design at Duke Kunshan University (DKU). Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow affiliated with the Pervasive Wellbeing Technology Lab at Stanford University and prior to that, she was a member of the Pain Studies Lab and received her Ph.D. at Simon Fraser University (SFU), under the supervision of Dr. Diane Gromala with co-supervisors Dr. Chris Shaw and Dr. Dave Fracchia. Xin’s research contributes to the larger understanding of how people with physical and psychological disabilities experience and interact with technology, e.g., VR, games, wearables, and AI. Dr. Tong has published in many top-tier academic venues on HCI areas. She has been a reviewer and paper chair for high-impact conferences and journals, such as CHI, CSCW, DIS, Frontiers, IEEE VR, and so on. She is also a recipient of many international, national, and university fellowships and awards, such as Best Game Awards and Nominations at ACM CHI and Microsoft Unite Conference, SFU Provost Prize of Distinction Award, C.D. Nelson Memorial Scholarship, MITACS Research Training Award, SFU Big Data Graduate Scholarship, McQuarrie Chronic Pain Scholarship, and NSERC Post-Doctoral Fellowship.
Funding from an anonymous donor established this award in 2011 in honour of Bill Buxton, a Canadian researcher, designer, and musician who has done much to promote excellence in the field of Human-Computer Interaction, both within Canada and internationally. Bill challenges how academics and practitioners think, and he inspires them to do things differently. He is a true advocate for HCI.
The award is determined through a juried process by a selection committee consisting of accomplished researchers in Human-Computer Interaction, and this process was organized by Dr. Celine Latulipe (University of Manitoba). This year, the selection committee consisted of Dr. Charles Perrin (University of Victoria) who chaired the committee, Dr. Christopher Healey (North Carolina State University), Dr. Rita Orji (Dalhousie University), and Dr. Ryo Suzuki (University of Calgary).