Increasing agent physicality to raise social presence and elicit realistic behavior
Joon Hao Chuah, Andrew C. Robb, Casey B White, Adam Lin Wendling, Samsun Lampotang, Régis Kopper, Benjamin Chak Lum Lok · 2012
The concepts of immersion and presence focus on the environment in a virtual environment. We instead focus on embodied conversational agents (ECAs). ECAs occupy the virtual environment as interactive partners. We propose that the ECA analogues of immersion and presence are physicality and social presence. We performed a study to determine the effect of an ECA's physicality on social presence and eliciting realistic behavior from the user. The results showed that increasing physicality can elicit realistic behavior and increase social presence but there was also an interaction effect with plausibility.