Effects of Virtual Human Presence on Task Performance (original) (raw)

Social responses to virtual humans

Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI '07, 2007

Do human-human social interactions carry over to humanvirtual human social interactions? How does this affect future interface designers? We replicated classical tests of social influence known as the social facilitation and inhibition effects. Social facilitation/inhibition theory states that when in the presence of others, people perform simple tasks better and complex tasks worse. Participants were randomly assigned to perform both simple and complex tasks alone and in the presence of either a real human, a projected virtual human, or a virtual human in a headmounted display. Our results showed participants were inhibited by the presence of others, whether real or virtual. That is, participants performed worse on the complex task, both in terms of percent correct and reaction times, when in the presence of others than when alone. Social facilitation did not occur with the real or virtual human. We discuss these results and their implications for future interface designers.

Social Responses to Virtual Humans: The Effect of Human-Like Characteristics

Applied Sciences, 2021

As a virtual human is provided with more human-like characteristics, will it elicit stronger social responses from people? Two experiments were conducted to address these questions. The first experiment investigated whether virtual humans can evoke a social facilitation response and how strong that response is when people are given different cognitive tasks that vary in difficulty. The second experiment investigated whether people apply politeness norms to virtual humans. Participants were tutored either by a human tutor or a virtual human tutor that varied in features and then evaluated the tutor’s performance. Results indicate that virtual humans can produce social facilitation not only with facial appearance but also with voice. In addition, performance in the presence of voice synced facial appearance seems to elicit stronger social facilitation than in the presence of voice only or face only. Similar findings were observed with the politeness norm experiment. Participants who e...

The responses of people to virtual humans in an immersive virtual environment

Presence: Teleoperators & …, 2005

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.

Virtual Humans and Social Interaction

Abstract We thought that, virtual reality cannot merely be reduced to a hardware system, another way to achieve the optimal experience, is to produce a sense of immersion associated to an emotional and social experience inside the virtual environment. We believe that Virtual Characters that express a social and emotional behavior in their interaction could produce a sense of immersion in the user that interact with them. We propose to use this kind of character to develop social and emotional interfaces, capable to produce a believable Social Interaction.

Virtual humans as co-workers: A novel methodology to study peer effects

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 2018

We introduce a novel methodology to study peer effects. Using virtual reality technology, we create a naturalistic work setting in an immersive virtual environment where we embed a computer-generated virtual human as the co-worker of a human subject, both performing a sorting task at a conveyor belt. In our setup, subjects observe the virtual peer, while the virtual human is not observing them. In two treatments, human subjects observe either a low productive or a high productive virtual peer. We find that human subjects rate their presence feeling of "being there" in the immersive virtual environment as natural. Subjects also recognize that virtual peers in our two treatments showed different productivities. We do not find a general treatment effect on productivity. However, we find that competitive subjects display higher performance when they are in the presence of a highly productive peer-compared to when they observe a low productive peer. We use tracking data to learn about the subjects' body movements. Analyzing hand and head data, we show that competitive subjects are more careful in the sorting task than non-competitive subjects. We also discuss some VR related methodological issues.

Physical vs. Virtual Agent Embodiment and Effects on Social Interaction

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2016

Previous work indicates that physical robots elicit more favorable social responses than virtual agents. These effects have been attributed to the physical embodiment. However, a recent meta-analysis by Li [1] suggests that the benefits of robots are due to physical presence rather than physical embodiment. To further explore the importance of presence we conducted a pilot study investigating the relationship between physical and social presence. The results suggest that social presence of an artificial agent is important for interaction with people, and that the extent to which it is perceived as socially present might be unaffected by whether it is physically or virtually present.

Lessons Learned in Assessing Human-Virtual Human Interaction

2012

To avoid the “file drawer effect ” of unreported null results, we report on an experimental study in assessing humanvirtual human interaction. In this study, participants were asked to spend about ten minutes with a projected lifesized virtual human. The virtual human interacted with the participants by speaking to them and exhibited three different tones of voice and facial expressions corresponding to a happy, sleepy, or grumpy personality. The virtual human asked participants to help her with a visual memory task where they responded, via keyboard, to a series of question sets about various pictures. We hypothesized that the virtual human’s personality will have an effect on the amount of time participants are willing to help the virtual human on a task. In the results of our preliminary experiment, the personality of the virtual human had no effect on interaction time. First, we summarize the study and results, next we discuss some of the probable causes of our results, and fina...

Comparing interpersonal interactions with a virtual human to those with a real human

2007

Abstract This paper provides key insights into the construction and evaluation of interpersonal simulators-systems that enable interpersonal interaction with virtual humans. Using an interpersonal simulator, two studies were conducted that compare interactions with a virtual human to interactions with a similar real human. The specific interpersonal scenario employed was that of a medical interview. Medical students interacted with either a virtual human simulating appendicitis or a real human pretending to have the same symptoms.