Visual impairments significantly impact individuals' ability to perceive their surroundings, affecting everyday tasks and spatial navigation. This study explores SEEK VR,s a multi-modal virtual reality game designed to foster empathy and raise awareness about the challenges faced by visually impaired individuals. By integrating visual feedback, 3D spatial audio, and haptic feedback, the game provides an immersive experience that helps participants understand the physical and emotional struggles of visual impairment. The paper includes a review of related work on empathy-driven VR games, a detailed description of the design and implementation of SEEK VR, and the technical aspects of its multimodal interactions. A user study with 24 participants demonstrated significant increases in empathy, particularly in empathy and willingness to help visually impaired individuals in real-world scenarios. These findings highlight the potential of VR serious games to promote social awareness and empathy through immersive, multi-modal interactions.

Social learning games can enhance students' learning engagement in the field of STEM. However, students do not always have the chance to experience social interactions during their learning activities. Augmented reality (AR) games have the ability to enable social interactions among students and allow them to interact with the virtual content while engaging in natural communication in the real world. However, little is still known on how to design social AR games for learning. In this paper, we presented a textbook-based AR social learning game for elementary school students to practice math together. We designed and developed the game concepts based on previous studies and co-design sessions and conducted a user study to explore how students would behave and interact with each other in the game. Our findings extend the understanding of students' social patterns in both collaboration and competition conditions under AR settings. Based on the findings, we propose design implications for designing AR social learning games in the future.

Augmented Reality is becoming an emerging trend in the development of play-and-learn experience and increasingly accessible to children. However, there is a lack of understanding of how to design AR games to effectively improve children's learning experience, especially with respect to the novel interaction and representation paradigms that AR affords. In this study, we describe the design and the implementation process of different interaction types (screen-touch and tangible interaction) and feedback mechanisms (non-diegetic feedback and diegetic feedback) in an AR math game for children aged 7 and 8. We report the insights based on our current prototypes and discuss the design implications for our future work.