This one-day workshop will bring together a community of researchers, designers, practitioners, and other experts who are interested in the responsible design of immersive media---or augmented, virtual, mixed, and cross reality---for children, while taking into account children's developmental needs, equity, and inclusivity. At the workshop, participants will discuss and make connections across their work, participate in hands-on activities, and begin producing a set of design guidelines for immersive media for children, grounded in their collective experiences, research, and knowledge of the field. After the workshop, we will publish these guidelines as a white paper to distribute to interested industries, developers, designers, and more to positively influence the thoughtful design of immersive media for children.

This study used both quantitative and qualitative data to assess whether a High Immersion viewing platform (virtual reality headset) elicits stronger feelings of narrative engagement and empathy compared to a Low Immersion platform (smartphone) when viewing an animated 360° video. In line with prior research, participants (N = 65) reported greater feelings of presence in the High Immersion condition compared to Low Immersion. However, immersive condition was not significantly related to narrative engagement or empathy. Interview responses revealed that participants' perceptions of their role in the film experience (i.e., Character, Observer, or Other/Not Sure) varied and were significantly related to narrative engagement. Participants who saw themselves as a Character (versus Observer) reported higher narrative engagement and empathy. Findings suggest that although a more immersive viewing platform can enhance presence during a 360° video experience, a clear understanding of viewer role is both difficult to achieve and critical to story comprehension and empathy.

In this study we evaluated a novel approach for examining the link between gaming expertise and cognitive skills, and the value of recruiting and running participants at a MOBA gaming tournament. Participants completed a set of cognitive tasks that measured spatial working and long term (location) memory, basic cognitive processing, and gaming experience. Comparable reliability on the working memory task and results in line with previous research on the location memory task indicated the data collected was valid and reliable. We observed a significant relation between gaming experience and response time on the location memory task. We discuss that conducting gaming research at a tournament is a valid way of collecting data for a gaming expertise study while providing a range of gaming expertise that may not be available when recruiting at college campuses. Furthermore, our results extend previous gaming research that suggests that individual differences in gaming experience are correlated with the speed of recalling spatial information from long term memory.