Effect of Social Actors Perceived Agency on Social Presence in Computer-Mediated Communication

Nowadays, both text-based and 3D online applications rely on conversational agents and autonomous characters to interact with users. Previous experiments demonstrated that perceived agency, that is to say, one’s belief in interacting with a computer- or another human-controlled entity could impact social interaction. At present, theories and results still diverge and no consensus has been reached. Therefore, we developed an experiment to investigate the effect of perceived agency and emotional communication on social presence. Participants were told that they would play an online image recognition game against a computer- or a human-controlled opponent. In both cases, participants faced a computer-controlled opponent designed to provide a challenging yet balanced competitive experience. Depending on the experimental conditions, participants were able to communicate with their opponents using emoticons between the game rounds. Results demonstrate a significant main effect of emotional communication on the three dimensions of social presence we considered in this experiment. An interaction effect between perceived agency and emotional communication was observed in copresence, another core dimension of social presence. The impact of emotional communication on participants’ sense of copresence depends on the perceived agency of the opponent. A significant increase was observed for participants facing a computer-controlled opponent when emotional communication was allowed. The sense of copresence was even higher when they were facing a computer-controlled opponent rather than a presumed human-controlled one. These results are discussed with regard to theories of social interaction in computer-mediated communication

Impact of Avatar Anthropomorphism and Task Type on Social Presence in Immersive Collaborative Virtual Environments

Eliciting a sense of social presence is necessary to create believable multi-user situations in immersive virtual environments. To be able to collaborate in virtual worlds, users are represented by avatars (virtual characters controlled in real time) allowing them to interact with each other. We report a study investigating the impact on social presence of both non-human avatars’ facial properties and of the type of collaborative task being performed by the users (asymmetric collaboration versus negotiation). While we observed no significant impact of facial properties, both co-presence and perceived message understanding scores were significantly higher during the negotiation task

Effect of Avatar Anthropomorphism on Body Ownership, Attractiveness and Collaboration in Immersive Virtual Environments

Effective collaboration in immersive virtual environments requires to be able to communicate flawlessly using both verbal and non-verbal communication. We present an experiment investigating the impact of anthropomorphism on the sense of body ownership, avatar attractiveness and performance in an asymmetric collaborative task. Using three avatars presenting different facial properties, participants have to solve a construction game according to their partner’s instructions. Results reveal no significant difference in terms of body ownership, but demonstrate significant differences concerning attractiveness and completion duration of the collaborative task. However the relative verbal interaction duration seems not impacted by the anthropomorphism level of the characters, meaning that participants were able to interact verbally independently of the way their character physically express their words in the virtual environment. Unexpectedly, correlation analyses also reveal a link between attractiveness and performance. The more attractive the avatar, the shorter the completion duration of the game. One could argue that, in the context of this experiment, avatar attractiveness could have led to an improvement in non-verbal communication as users could be more prone to observe their partner which translates into better performance in collaborative tasks. Other experiments must be conducted using gaze tracking to support this new hypothesis

Impact of avatar facial anthropomorphism on body ownership, attractiveness and social presence in collaborative tasks in immersive virtual environments

Effective collaboration in immersive virtual environments requires to be able to communicate flawlessly using both verbal and non-verbal communication. We present two experiments investigating the impact of facial anthropomorphism on the sense of body ownership, avatar attractiveness, social presence and performance in two collaborative tasks. In the first experiment participants have to solve a construction game according to their partner’s instructions using three avatars presenting different facial properties. Results reveal no significant difference in terms of body ownership and social presence, but demonstrate significant differences in terms of attractiveness and completion duration of the collaborative task. Unexpectedly, correlation analyses also reveal a link between attractiveness and performance. The more attractive the avatar, the shorter the completion duration of the game. Our second experiment was designed to investigate further the potential impact of the task carried out on the sense of social presence using the same avatars. While we observed a very high sense of social presence in both tasks (asymmetric collaboration and negotiation) with every avatar, our results did not reveal significant difference between the three conditions. However, we observed statistically significant differences between the two task types. The scores of the co-presence and of the perceived message understanding dimensions of social presence were higher during the negotiation task. The sense of social presence appears to be task sensitive, especially when non-verbal communication becomes more important during face-to-face interaction in immersive collaborative virtual environments

CRUX : A CReativity and User eXperience Model

The field of Virtual Reality has been developing at a steady pace, and VR is finding new uses as a support for creative tasks. The objective of this study is to propose a theoretical model describing the links between user experience and creativity. Pre-existing theoretical links have been identified in relevant scientific literature. Two experiments were then conducted in order to identify new links and replicate results. These experiments involved respectively 76 and 42 participants who individually performed a task requiring divergent creativity using virtual reality drawing tools. The results indicate that cybersickness leads to a decrease in fluency, i.e. the number of ideas generated, but also shades the links between flow and the relevance of the ideas generated. On the basis of this result, we propose the CRUX model to lead to recommendations for the design of tools and simulations to support divergent creativity