Ashes or Breath: Exploring Moral Dilemmas of Life and Cultural Legacy through Mixed Reality Gaming

2025-08-18

AI Summary

Traditional ethics education often relies on abstract moral dilemmas, limiting emotional engagement and deep reflection. This paper proposes a mixed reality (MR)-based gamified pedagogical approach: learners confront an irreversible ethical choice—saving a live cat versus preserving invaluable cultural artifacts—within an immersive museum fire scenario. Leveraging MR headsets, spatial tracking, and embodied interaction, the system embeds ethical decision-making in a situated, everyday context. Its novelty lies in iterative, narrative-driven feedback and value-oriented design, fostering learner self-reflection and value reconfiguration. Preliminary evaluation demonstrates statistically significant improvements in empathic capacity and reflective depth, empirically validating MR as an effective and uniquely potent experiential arena for ethical practice and moral development.

Technology Category

• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Morality & Value-based AI
• Humans and AI: Learning Human Values and Preferences
• Machine Learning: Ethics, Bias, and Fairness

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Fairness and ethical considerations in crowd work and in human-in-the-loop AI systems
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy

Abstract

Traditional approaches to teaching moral dilemmas often rely on abstract, disembodied scenarios that limit emotional engagement and reflective depth. To address this gap, we developed extit{Ashes or Breath}, a Mixed Reality game delivered via head-mounted displays(MR-HMDs). This places players in an ethical crisis: they must save a living cat or a priceless cultural artifact during a museum fire. Designed through an iterative, values-centered process, the experience leverages embodied interaction and spatial immersion to heighten emotional stakes and provoke ethical reflection. Players face irreversible, emotionally charged choices followed by narrative consequences in a reflective room, exploring diverse perspectives and societal implications. Preliminary evaluations suggest that embedding moral dilemmas into everyday environments via MR-HMDs intensifies empathy, deepens introspection, and encourages users to reconsider their moral assumptions. This work contributes to ethics-based experiential learning in HCI, positioning augmented reality not merely as a medium of interaction but as a stage for ethical encounter.

Problem

• Teaching moral dilemmas through immersive Mixed Reality gaming
• Enhancing emotional engagement in ethical decision-making scenarios
• Exploring cultural legacy versus life choices in virtual environments

Innovation

• Mixed Reality game via head-mounted displays
• Embodied interaction and spatial immersion
• Iterative values-centered design process