Marcus or Mira - Investigating the Perception of Virtual Agent Gender in Virtual Reality Role Play-Training

Immersive virtual training environments are used in various domains. In this work we focus on role-play training in virtual reality. In virtual role-play training conversations and interactions with virtual agents are often fundamental to the training. Therefore, the appearance and behavior of the agents plays an important role when designing role-play training.We focus on the gender appearance of agents, as gender is an important aspect for differentiation between characters. We conducted a study with 40 participants in which we investigated how agents gender appearance influences the perception of the agents´ personality traits and the self-perception of a participants’ assumed role in a training for social skills. This work contributes towards understanding the design-space of virtual agent design, virtual agent gender identity, and the design and development of immersive virtual reality role-play training

Peak Moments of Physical Mobile Interaction Techniques

Users are able to connect their mobile phones to nearby objects using four common physical mobile interaction techniques: pointing, touching, scanning, and typing manual input. A set of prior user studies has compared these techniques, but none of the comparison studies have included a more recent form of the pointing technique: image recognition. We investigate users’ peak-moment experiences while using physical mobile interaction techniques, including image recognition, by applying the critical incident technique (CIT). As a result, we present a comprehensive categorization for sources of user perceptions, describe the differences between the techniques, and position image recognition among other techniques. Our study adds a source category – achievement – that prior comparison studies have not covered. Also, we discovered that control is a crucial issue for users, even though it is often understated in prior comparison studies

Understanding the Headless Rider: Display-Based Awareness and Intent-Communication in Automated Vehicle-Pedestrian Interaction in Mixed Traffic

Automated vehicles do not yet have clearly defined signaling methods towards other road users, which could complement natural communication practices with human drivers, such as eye contact or hand gestures. In order to establish trust, external human–machine interfaces (eHMIs) have been proposed, but so far, these have not been widely evaluated in natural traffic contexts. This paper presents a user study where 30 participants interacted with a functional display-based visual eHMI for an automated shuttle in mixed urban traffic. Two distinct features were investigated: the communication of (1) its awareness of different obstacles on the road ahead and (2) of its intention to start or to brake. The results indicate that the majority of participants in general regarded eHMIs as necessary for automated vehicles. When reflecting their experience with the eHMIs, about half of the participants experienced an increased comprehension and safety. The combined presentation of obstacle awareness and vehicle intentions helped more participants to understand the shuttle’s behavior than the presentation of obstacle awareness only, but fewer participants regarded this combination of awareness and intent to be safe. The strength of the found effects on subjective responses varied with regard to age and gender