Virtual Character Personality Influences Participant Attitudes and Behavior – An Interview with a Virtual Human Character about Her Social Anxiety

Abstract

We introduce a novel technique for the study of human-virtual character interaction in immersive virtual reality.The human participants verbally administered a standard questionnaire about social anxiety to a virtual female character, which responded to each question through speech and body movements. The purpose was to study the extent to which participants responded differently to characters that exhibited different personalities, even though the verbal content of their answers was always the same. A separate online study provided evidence that our intention to create two different personality types had been successful. In the main between-groups experiment that utilized a Cave system there were 24 male participants, where 12 interacted with a female virtual character portrayed to exhibit shyness and the remaining 12 with an identical but more confident virtual character. Our results indicate that although the content of the verbal responses of both virtual characters was the same, participants showed different subjective and behavioral responses to the two different personalities. In particular participants evaluated the shy character more positively, for example, expressing willingness to spend more time with her. Participants evaluated the confident character more negatively and waited for a significantly longer time to call her back after she had left the scene in order to answer a telephone call. The method whereby participants interviewed the virtual character allowed naturalistic conversation while avoiding the necessity of speech processing and generation, and natural language understanding. It is therefore a useful method for the study of the impact of virtual character personality on participant responses.

Virtual reality for social skills training

“…The first experiment was centred on a virtual audience (Pertaub, Slater, & Barker, 2002). Participants were (Pertaub et al, 2002), b-the London underground (Freeman et al, 2008), c-the Milgram re-creation (Slater et al, 2006), dthe virtual bar (Pan et al, 2012), e-the socially anxious virtual character (Pan et al, 2015) and f-the medical consultation (Xueni Pan et al, 2016).…”

“…The Milgram re-creation could be seen as a two-way interaction, but a highly artificial, formalized one that bears little resemblance to a normal conversation. To address this limitation, Pan, Slater and colleagues (Pan, Gillies, & Slater, 2015;Pan, Gillies, Barker, Clark, & Slater, 2012) have developed experiments that involve realistic conversations with virtual characters.…”

“…A follow-on experiment investigated the effect of a virtual human's personality on the interaction, with a virtual character who displayed behaviour associated with either low or high social anxiety (Pan, Gillies, & Slater, 2015). Participants were asked to interview the character (Figure 1e), asking questions of a personal nature that were potentially embarrassing.…”

Creating Virtual Characters

“…A follow-on experiment reversed the situation, with a virtual character that displayed behavior associated with either low or high social anxiety [12]. Participants were asked to interview the character asking questions on the personal nature that were potentially embarrassing.…”

“…In front of them they could see an audience composed of a small number of animated virtual characters. [14], the London underground [2], the Milgram recreation [16], the virtual bar [11], the socially anxious virtual character [12] and the medical consultation [13].…”