Summary

In response to Aotearoa New Zealand’s critical need for well-trained professionals in early childhood education (ECE) and healthcare, and confident parents, our research offers an innovative solution: The VR Baby training tool focused on enhancing relational skills in sensitive interactions, particularly between adults and infants.

At the heart of our approach lies whanaungatanga, the Māori value of forming and maintaining relationships. Through immersive VR experiences, our tool aims to develop intuitive responses and attentiveness to communicative cues, ultimately improving care-giving techniques in real-world encounters. By enhancing the quality of care and education provided to infants and paediatric patients, our VR-based approach has the potential to foster higher levels of well-being, reduce failure rates in early childhood learning and healthcare, and alleviate burdens on social services.

Our interdisciplinary team is dedicated to evaluating the impact of VR-enhanced training on relational skills and assessing its applicability across various professions. Early findings indicate significant improvements in professionals’ confidence and competence.

The impact of our research extends beyond professionals to the infants and their parents, as well as the broader IT and media training industry in New Zealand. We are committed to extracting design principles from our research to benefit IT and game development for training, ensuring that future professionals are equipped with the skills and knowledge necessary for compassionate and effective care.

Together, we are pioneering a new era in professional education, driven by intercultural values, innovation, and a shared commitment to the well-being of New Zealand’s youngest citizens.

Funding Acknowledgement

This project received Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) Smart Ideas funding in the 2024 round of the Endeavour Fund.

Contact

Assoc. Professor Heide Lukosch, HIT Lab NZ, University of Canterbury.

Related Projects

VR Baby Training Tool (VRBTT)

PhD Scholarship Position

We are looking for a student to undertake doctoral research on using immersive virtual reality in early childhood education and healthcare.

This PhD is part of a project funded by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) New Zealand. The candidate will work in a trans-disciplinary team which will develop new grammars for bi-cultural relational skills between caregiver and healthcare provider and infants, applied and tested in an immersive virtual reality (VR) environment. They will contribute to the development and evaluation of the environment, including user feedback mechanisms and an intelligent system orchestrating a virtual baby’s preferences, responses and behavior. This will include expert interviews and the design and deployment of user studies as well as processing the collected data. The project will make use of an existing VR prototype, which will be further developed.

The successful candidate will join the Human Interface Technology (HIT Lab NZ) in the Faculty of Engineering and the School of Teacher Education at the Faculty of Education – University of Canterbury, and will be supervised by Assoc. Prof. Heide Lukosch and Prof. Jayne White. It is expected that the successful candidate will take part in trans-disciplinary work, including empirical data collection, in the areas of HCI and education. This PhD is part of a collaboration with the University of Otago, Christchurch.

Key Qualifications and Skills

The successful candidate will undertake research on:

• • bi-cultural design guidelines for an immersive VR learning environment for relational skills with infants, and
  • the experience and learning effects of the VR learning environment with the target audience.

The ideal candidate will have:

• • A relevant bachelor’s degree with honours or research-based master’s degree (or equivalent) in the field of HCI, Computer Science, Educational Technology, Science Communication, or similar.
  • Strong interpersonal, cultural and relational skills across disciplines.
  • Appropriate research and writing skills and the capacity to conduct complex literature reviews (desirable to have experience with Zotero and/or NVivo).
  • Experience with research processes including participatory, user-centred, or co-design.
  • Prior experience or commitment to research processes such as interviews, user studies and evaluation.
  • Desirable skills in public sector communications.
  • Excellent spoken and written English.

Stipend

$35,000 NZD plus study fees per year for 3 years.

How to apply

• • Letter of motivation detailing experience/background in relation to the listed key qualifications
  • CV
  • Academic transcript

Final date for receiving applications

31st January 2025.

Contact for applications and informal enquiries

• • Assoc. Prof. Heide Lukosch, HIT Lab NZ, University of Canterbury
  • Prof. Jayne White, Faculty of Education, University of Canterbury

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