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

Introduction. As part of life, 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 thist 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.