2025
Exploring Older People's User Experiences with VR: A Case Study of Taiwanese Seniors.
Cheih-Ying Chen, Fanfan Chen, & Cheng-En Tsai. Entertainment Computing 55, Article 100974.
doi.org/10.1016/j.entcom.2025.100974 ↗
I'm Cheng-En Tsai — a PhD student at National Taiwan University working at the intersection of narratology, large language models, and extended reality. My research designs intelligent agents that help older adults recall, share, and re-author their own life stories.
I started in the humanities, studying history at National Dong Hwa University, then turned toward digital learning — designing 3D and VR games to teach AI literacy. Today, my doctoral work at NTU's Networking and Multimedia program weaves these threads together.
Under the guidance of Prof. Jane Yung-jen Hsu and Prof. Yi-Ping Hung, I build narrative-aware language agents: chatbots and embodied avatars that interview retired adults using Todorov's narrative grammar, then return their everyday memories as well-formed autobiographical stories.
When I'm not researching, I teach Interactive Digital Narrative, Extended Reality, and Unreal Engine at the National Taipei University of Business.
Teaching Interactive Digital Narrative, Extended Reality, Applied Unreal Engine, and Game Design. Also supervising graduation projects on Mixed-Reality Rehabilitation, VR-Based Education, and AR Board Games.
TA for Artificial Intelligence and Game for Life: Reading and Re-designing Games for a Purpose. Recognized as Outstanding TA for both courses.
Center daily operations, serious-game development, and narrative design research bridging humanities scholars and game developers.
From cloud gaming to LLM-powered occupational therapy — a continuous arc of research on how technology can hold space for the stories of older generations.
Developing an SLM-based module for creating and adapting uplifting stories, including the design of a safety mechanism that quantitatively evaluates the cultural diversity of story texts.
Designing in-context learning prompts for LLMs to enable automated analysis of cognitive board-game activities; using the analysis as the knowledge source for a RAG pipeline that powers a chatbot for occupational therapists.
Developed humanoid robots and virtual avatars that use narratological frameworks to guide older adults in recalling and sharing everyday stories, then compile them into well-structured autobiographical narratives.
Recruited and trained team members from humanities, social-science, and design backgrounds to develop 3D adventure and VR serious-game content using Unreal Engine, while investigating narrative design practices in the digital game industry.
Peer-reviewed journal papers, book chapters, and international conference presentations on narrative AI, computational rhetoric, and human-AI interaction.
The 2024 Advanced Display Technologies Innovative Applications Contest · Taipei, Taiwan
National Taiwan University, CSIE — for the Artificial Intelligence course.
National Taiwan University, CSIE — for Game for Life: Reading and Re-designing Games for a Purpose.
I'm always open to collaborations on narrative AI, XR for older adults, or computational approaches to rhetoric and storytelling.