Videoconference has become the dominant technology for remote meetings. Embodied Virtual Reality is a potential alternative that employs motion tracking in order to place people in a shared virtual environment as avatars. This paper describes a 210 participant study focused on behavioral measures that compares multiparty interaction in videoconference and embodied VR across a range of task types: a factual intellective task, a subjective judgment task and two negotiation tasks, one with visual grounding. It uses state-of-the-art body, face and finger tracking to drive the avatars in VR and a carefully matched videoconferencing implementation. Significant behavioral differences are observed. These include increased activity in videoconference related to maintaining the social connection: more person directed gaze and increased verbal and nonverbal backchannel behavior. Videoconference also had reduced conversational overlap, increased self-adaptor gestures and reduced deictic gestures as compared with embodied VR. Potential explanations and implications are discussed.
Part 1: Fundamental IssuesInternational audienceIn this paper we outline the design and development of an embodied conversational agent setup that incorporates an augmented reality screen and tactile sleeve. With this setup the agent can visually and physically touch the user. We provide a literature overview of embodied conversational agents, as well as haptic technologies, and argue for the importance of adding touch to an embodied conversational agent. Finally, we provide guidelines for studies involving the touching virtual agent (TVA) setup
In this paper we examine how simulated social touch by a virtual agent in a cooperative or competitive augmented reality game influences the perceived trustworthiness, warmth and politeness of the agent. Before and after the game, participants interact with two agents whereby one agent touches the participant's arm. Results showed no significant difference in how agents are perceived in the cooperative and competitive situation. However, significant differences between perception of the touching and non-touching agents could be observed for warmth.
Modern game engines such as Unity make prototyping and developing experiences for virtual and mixed reality contexts increasingly accessible and efficient, and their value has long been recognized by the scientific community as well. However, these game engines do not have the capabilities to control virtual embodied characters, situated in such environments, with the same expressiveness, flexibility, and generalizability, as offered by modern BML realizers that generate synchronized multimodal behavior from Behavior Markup Language (BML). We implemented a Unity embodiment bridge to the Articulated Social Agents Platform (ASAP) to combine the benefits of a modern game engine and a modern BML realizer. The challenges and solutions we report can help others integrate other game engines with BML realizers, and we end with a glimpse at future challenges and features of our implementation.
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