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.
Despite being aware that the agents were computer-generated, participants with
higher levels of social anxiety were significantly more likely to avoid “disturbing”
them. This suggests that on some level people can respond to virtual humans as
social actors even in the absence of complex interaction.
Responses appear to be shaped both by the agents’ behaviors and by people’s expectations
of the technology. Participants experienced a significantly higher sense of
personal contact when the agents were visually responsive to them, as opposed to
static or simply moving. However, this effect diminished with experienced computer
users. Our preliminary analysis of objective heart-rate data reveals an identical pattern
of responses
