Designing Empathic Agents: Adults Versus Kids (original) (raw)
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A study into the believability of animated characters in the context of bullying intervention
The VICTEC (Virtual ICT with Empathic Characters) project provides an opportunity to explore the use of animated characters in a virtual environment for educational issues such as bullying behaviour. Our research aim was to evaluate whether an early prototype of the VICTEC demonstrator could provide useful information about character and story believability, physical aspects of the characters and story comprehensibility. Results from an evaluation with 76 participants revealed high levels of bullying story believability and character conversation was rated as convincing and interesting. In contrast, character movement was poorly rated. Overall the results imply that poor physical aspects of characters do not have detrimental effects on story believability and interest levels with the demonstrator. It is concluded that even at this early design phase, the demonstrator provides a suitable means to explore how virtual environments in terms of character and storyline believability may a...
Animated Characters in Bullying Intervention
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2003
The VICTEC (Virtual ICT with Empathic Characters) project explores the use of animated characters in virtual environments for educational issues, such as bullying behaviour. 76 participants evaluated a prototype of the VICTEC demonstrator. Results revealed high story believability with character conversation rated as convincing and interesting whilst character movement was poorly rated. The results imply that poor physical aspects of characters do not have detrimental effects on story believability and interest levels.
Computers in Human Behavior, 2007
This paper considers the impact of gender on the design of animated agents that aim to evoke empathy and to encourage children to explore issues related to bullying. High fidelity storyboards containing bullying scenarios were presented to 80 ten year old children from two schools. Children individually completed a questionnaire that focused on amongst other things the empathic relationship between the child and the characters in the storyboard. Results indicate significant differences between the genders, with greater levels of empathy and comprehension achieved when characters are of the same gender as the child. This has considerable implications for the design of animated characters for bullying scenarios, requiring that the gender of the child is taken into account when designing animated characters and the scenarios they participate in.
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Lecture Notes in Computer Science
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In this chapter, we give an overview of the FearNot! virtual drama system constructed for use in education against bullying. The motivation for the system is discussed and the chapter considers issues relating to believability. It describes the emotionally driven architecture used for characters as well as the management of the overall story and finally considers issues relating to evaluation of systems like this.
ECEL 2007: 6th European Conference on E-Learning: Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, 4-5 October 2007, 2007
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Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
Designers of virtual agents have a combinatorically large space of choices for the look and behavior of their characters. We conducted two between-subjects studies to explore the systematic manipulation of animation quality, speech quality, rendering style, and simulated empathy, and its impact on perceptions of virtual agents in terms of naturalness, engagement, trust, credibility, and persuasion within a health counseling domain. In the first study, animation was varied between manually created, procedural, or no animations; voice quality was varied between recorded audio and synthetic speech; and rendering style was varied between realistic and toon-shaded. In the second study, simulated empathy of the agent was varied between no empathy, verbalonly empathic responses, and full empathy involving verbal, facial, and immediacy feedback. Results show that natural animations and recorded voice are more appropriate for the agent's general acceptance, trust, credibility, and appropriateness for the task. However, for a brief health counseling task, animation might actually be distracting from the persuasive message, with the highest levels of persuasion found when the amount of agent animation is minimized. Further, consistent and high levels of empathy improve agent perception but may interfere with forming a trusting bond with the agent.