The Impact of Avatar Blushing on the Duration of Interaction between a Real and Virtual Person
Xueni Pan, Marco Fyfe Pietro Gillies, Mel Slater · 2008
This paper describes an experimental study on human participants’ reactions towards a blushing avatar. As one of the “most human of all expressions”, blushing serves an important role in interpersonal communication. In this paper we describe an experiment in which there is an interaction between a person and an avatar who “blushes” in an embarrassing situation. Our major question of interest was whether participants would be influenced by the blushing, and whether they would tolerate the avatar longer than in the situation where there was no blushing. Moreover, two different type of blushing were considered: whole-face blushing and cheek blushing. This work uses behavioural and questionnaire responses. The results show first, participants tended to withdraw early when the avatar was blushing only on the cheek; second, the whole-face blushing improved participants’ degree of “co-presence”.