User Perceptions of Communicative and Task-competent Agents in a Virtual Basketball Game

Abstract

In this paper, we describe a virtual basketball game where a human and an embodied agent can play together as a team. Our goal is to investigate whether the human prefers an agent who is highly competent at basketball or one which is not as competent but tries to actively communicate through body movements. The virtual basketball game was implemented using a Kinect to sense body movements and a pressure sensor for handsfree navigation. In order to create an agent who could react to a user's body movements, we designed an agent model based on joint activity theory. We performed an experiment where participants would play virtual basketball with each agent and evaluated them through questionnaires. It was found that participants preferred the agent which tried to communicate more with the user, even though they could distinguish that the other agent was better at playing basketball. We propose that communication capability for these types of agents is crucial, even at the expense of some task ability.