In this paper we describe an experiment designed to investigate the importance of eye gaze in humanoid avatars representing people engaged in conversation. We compare responses to dyadic conversations in four mediated conditions: video, audio-only, and two avatar conditions. The avatar conditions differed only in their treatment of eye gaze. In the random-gaze condition the avatar's head and eye animations were unrelated to conversational flow. In the informed-gaze condition, they were related to turn-taking during the conversation. The head animations were tracked and the eye animations were inferred from the audio stream. Our comparative analysis of 100 post-experiment questionnaires showed that the random-gaze avatar did not improve on audio-only communication. The informed-gaze avatar significantly outperformed the random-gaze model and also outperformed audio-only on several response measures. We conclude that an avatar whose gaze behaviour is related to the conversation provides a marked improvement on an avatar that merely exhibits liveliness.
This paper presents an experiment investigating the impact of behavior and responsiveness on social responses to virtual humans in an immersive virtual environment (IVE). A number of responses are investigated, including presence, copresence, and two physiological responses-heart rate and electrodermal activity (EDA). Our findings suggest that increasing agents' responsiveness even on a simple level can have a significant impact on certain aspects of people's social responses to humanoid agents.Despite being aware that the agents were computer-generated, participants with higher levels of social anxiety were significantly more likely to avoid "disturbing" them. This suggests that on some level people can respond to virtual humans as social actors even in the absence of complex interaction.Responses appear to be shaped both by the agents' behaviors and by people's expectations of the technology. Participants experienced a significantly higher sense of personal contact when the agents were visually responsive to them, as opposed to static or simply moving. However, this effect diminished with experienced computer users. Our preliminary analysis of objective heart-rate data reveals an identical pattern of responses.
An experiment was conducted in a Cave-like environment to explore the relationship between physiological responses and each of breaks in presence, and utterances by virtual characters towards the participants. Twenty people explored a virtual environment (VE) that depicted a virtual bar scenario. The experiment was divided into a training and an experimental phase.During the experimental phase breaks in presence (BIPs) in form of whiteouts of the VE scenario were induced for 2 seconds at four equally spaced times during the approximate 5 minutes in the bar scenario. Additionally 5 virtual characters addressed remarks at the subjects. Physiological measures including ECG and GSR were recorded throughout the whole experiment. The heart rate, the heart rate variability and the event-related heart rate changes were calculated from the acquired ECG data. The frequency response of the GSR signal was calculated with a wavelet analysis. The study shows that the heart rate and heart rate variability parameters vary significantly between the training and experimental phase.GSR parameters and event-related heart rate changes show the occurrence of breaks in presence. Event-related heart rate changes also signified the virtual character utterances.There were also differences in response observed between more and less social phobic participants.
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