research-article

The Impact of Virtual Reality in the Social Presence of a Virtual Agent

Authors:

Manuel Guimarães,

Pedro A. Santos,

Samuel MascarenhasAuthors Info & Claims

IVA '20: Proceedings of the 20th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents

Article No.: 23, Pages 1 - 8

https://doi.org/10.1145/3383652.3423879

Published: 19 October 2020 Publication History

Abstract

In this work we test the hypothesis that interacting with an intelligent virtual character in Virtual Reality (VR) has a stronger impact compared to the same interaction in a traditional non-immersive platform, both in terms of presence and believability.

We designed a Social Skills Training scenario of a police interview, based on interactions observed in real cases with the help of teachers and experts from that field. To test our hypothesis, we conducted experiments with two treatments: one in VR and the other displayed on a conventional computer screen.

We collected qualitative and quantitative data using instruments with elements from well-established presence and situated interaction questionnaires. Results indicate that participant perception of social presence of virtual characters is higher in VR. No significant difference in believability was observed across treatments

The experimental design encourages further work on measurement of effects of social presence and its impact on design of intelligent interactions in the context of Social Skills Training environments and immersive platforms.

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Index Terms

The Impact of Virtual Reality in the Social Presence of a Virtual Agent
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Artificial intelligence
    1. Distributed artificial intelligence
      1. Intelligent agents
2. Human-centered computing
  1. Human computer interaction (HCI)
    1. Interaction paradigms
      1. Virtual reality

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cover image ACM Conferences

IVA '20: Proceedings of the 20th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents

October 2020

394 pages

ISBN:9781450375863

DOI:10.1145/3383652

Copyright © 2020 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 19 October 2020

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Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia
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IVA '20

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SIGAI

IVA '20: ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents

October 20 - 22, 2020

Scotland, Virtual Event, UK

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https://doi.org/10.61506/01.00431
Yoon HIm HKim YSong YYi T(2024)Investigating Preferential Usability on Intelligent Agent-Driven Multimodal Interaction within the Extended Reality EnvironmentArchives of Design Research10.15187/adr.2024.08.37.4.737:4(7-24)Online publication date: 31-Aug-2024
https://doi.org/10.15187/adr.2024.08.37.4.7
Choi MCui DKoilias AMousas C(2024)The Effects of Virtual Character's Intelligence and Task's Complexity during an Immersive Jigsaw Puzzle Co-solving TaskProceedings of the 17th ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion, Interaction, and Games10.1145/3677388.3696324(1-12)Online publication date: 21-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3677388.3696324
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Wan HZhang JSuria AYao BWang DCoady YPrpa M(2024)Building LLM-based AI Agents in Social Virtual RealityExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3651026(1-7)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
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Wang NLiu ZYang HRen ZXie W(2024)“Treat Me as Your Friend, Not a Virtual Being”: The Impact of Intelligent Virtual Agent’s Self-Disclosure of Different Emotions on Children’s FriendshipInternational Journal of Human–Computer Interaction10.1080/10447318.2024.2332029(1-17)Online publication date: 27-Mar-2024
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