Metaphor Training: Robot and VR
Metaphor is not a rhetorical ornament: it is a fundamental cognitive structure. Through metaphors we connect different domains of experience, construct meaning, develop empathy and problem-solving skills. Training metaphorical thinking means training the ability to interpret the world.
This project was created to transform that training into an immersive, interactive and technologically advanced experience.
This project was created to transform such training into an immersive, interactive, and technologically advanced experience.
Metaphor is not merely a linguistic ornament, but a central structure of thought through which we connect different domains of experience, construct meaning, exercise empathy, and develop problem-solving skills. For this reason, the project was created with the aim of transforming metaphorical training into an interactive, immersive, and measurable experience.
Chatbot e LLM
An automated digital system was designed to guide participants in the analysis of pairs of metaphorical images. Participants are first asked to provide a literal description, then to identify the shared property, and finally to formulate the metaphor explicitly. The system provides progressive hints and an automatic evaluation of responses through a controlled artificial intelligence model capable of distinguishing between correct, partially correct, or incorrect answers, while also recording response times and progression in order to enable a quantitative analysis of learning.
Robot
This is complemented by an embodied version of the training conducted by the humanoid robot Nao, which introduces a dialogic and emotional dimension, reduces performance anxiety, and makes the experience more engaging.
In addition, a series of immersive virtual reality environments has been developed in which metaphors become interactive scenarios to explore and solve: participants do not simply explain the metaphor, but act it out within structured narrative contexts characterized by attention-distracting objects, visual and audio feedback systems, and a game-like progression that transforms figurative understanding into a physical and active experience.
VR
The virtual reality component represents the immersive core of the project. Interactive three-dimensional environments were designed and developed in which metaphors are transformed into experiences to be explored and solved firsthand, going beyond the purely linguistic dimension to activate a bodily and enactive understanding.
Vulnerable individuals
The metaphor is therefore not explained but represented through concrete actions that make explicit the transition from the literal domain to the figurative one. The architecture of the scenes integrates a progression of difficulty, timed hint systems, and a spatial design consistent with the symbolic logic of the metaphor, allowing the study of resolution times, strategies adopted, and modes of interpretation, thus transforming the virtual environment into a controlled laboratory for training and analysing symbolic thinking.
This is followed by a video featuring an elderly person interacting with the Nao robot.
- Paper accettato MIT conferenze, ottobre 2025. Connected Learining Summit
- Conferenza presso Palazzo Borromeo organizzata dall’Università San Raffaele
- Ecosistema RAISE, Spoke 1 entra nelle scuole