How to behave as Alice in Wonderland–about boredom and curiosity

In the context of cultural computing, we created a mixed reality environment that influences user affect and evokes predefined user behaviour. The theoretical challenge is applying persuasive design to virtual and augmented reality. Based on begin of the story ‘Alice’s in adventures in Wonderland’ users play the role of the character Alice in a park scene (the first stage out of a total of six). The mixed reality environment ALICE is designed for users to experience the same sequence of emotional and behavioural states as Alice did in her quest through surreal locations and events. This particular study addresses the sequential arousal and interdependencies of two drives: boredom and curiosity. Based on literature, we introduce general design guidelines for arousing boredom and explain how boredom can result in curiosity. We report on the design and redesign of the park environment with the entrance to the rabbit hole. In an experiment effectively arousing boredom can be demonstrated. Based on the experimental results we redesigned the park environment. In a second experiment effectively arousing curiosity was shown so that the particular sequence of events (e.g. appearance of the ‘White rabbit’ robot) had a significant positive influence on the arousal of curiosity and on triggering and guiding intended user behaviour.

Research highlights
► The begin (park scene) of the linear narrative of Alice adventures’ in Wonderland is build as an interactive experience.
► A combination of embodied agents (e.g. robot) and augmented reality is realized in a mixed reality system of 12 m × 5 m × 3 m.
► The design and redesign is based on new empirical findings for human behavior triggered by boredom and curiosity.