Avatars Versus Agents: A Meta-Analysis Quantifying the Effect of Agency on Social Influence

Existing research has investigated whether virtual representations perceived to be controlled by humans (i.e., avatars) or those perceived to be controlled by computer algorithms (i.e., agents) are more influential. A meta-analysis (N = 32) examined the model of social influence in virtual environments (Blascovich, 2002) and investigated whether agents and avatars in virtual environments elicit different levels of social influence. Results indicated that perceived avatars produced stronger responses than perceived agents. Level of immersion (desktop vs. fully immersive), dependent variable type (subjective vs. objective), task type (competitive vs. cooperative vs. neutral), and actual control of the representation (human vs. computer) were examined as moderators. An interaction effect revealed that studies conducted on a desktop that used objective measures showed a stronger effect for agency than those that were conducted on a desktop but used subjective measures. Competitive and cooperative tasks showed greater agency effects than neutral tasks. Studies in which both conditions were actually human controlled showed greater agency effects than studies in which both conditions were actually computer controlled. We discuss theoretical and design implications for human–computer interaction and computer-mediated communication.     

Social evaluations of embodied agents and avatars

The purpose of this study was to examine social evaluations (i.e., perceptions of empathy and positivity) following peoples’ interactions with digital human representations. Female research participants engaged in a 3-min interaction while immersed in a 3-D immersive virtual environment with a “peer counselor.” Participants were led to believe that the peer counselor was either an embodied agent (i.e., computer algorithm) or an avatar (i.e., another person). During the interaction, the peer counselor either smiled or not. As predicted, a digitally-rendered smile was found to affect participants’ social evaluations. However, these effects were moderated by participants’ beliefs about their interaction partner. Specifically, smiles enhanced social evaluations of embodied agents but degraded them for avatars. Although these results are consistent with other findings concerning the communicative realism of embodied agents and avatars they uniquely demonstrate that people’s beliefs alone, rather than actual differences in virtual representations, can impact social evaluations.     

LESSONS FROM EMOTION PSYCHOLOGY FOR THE DESIGN OF LIFELIKE CHARACTERS

ABSTRACT

This special issue describes a number of applications that utilize lifelike characters that teach indirectly, by playing some role in a social interaction with a user. The design of such systems reflects a compromise between competing, sometimes unarticulated, demands: They must realistically exhibit the behaviors and characteristics of their role, they must facilitate the desired learning, and they must work within the limitations of current technology, and there is little theoretical or empirical guidance on the impact of these compromises on learning. Our perspective on this problem is shaped by our interest in the role of emotion and emotional behaviors in such forms of learning. In recent years, there has been an explosion of interest in the role of emotion in the design of virtual humans. The techniques and motivations underlying these various efforts can seem, from an outsider's perspective, as bewildering and multifaceted as the concept of emotion itself is generally accused of being. Drawing on insights from emotion psychology, this article attempts to clarify for the designers of educational agents the various theoretical perspectives on the concept of emotion with the aim of giving guidance to designers of educational agents.     

Learning by teaching with virtual peers and the effects of technological design choices on learning

Advancements in technology have brought about new forms of learning and online instruction that allow communication through virtual representations without physically meeting in person. This study builds on previous work involving recursive feedback that tests the hypothesis that an important facet of learning-by-teaching is the opportunity to watch one's pupil perform. Sixty graduate students examined the value of recursive feedback that occurred when tutors observed their pupil subsequently apply what they had been taught. The study took place in the virtual environment Second Life where adults tutored another adult about human biology through their virtual representations. The tutors who observed their pupil avatar interact with an examiner exhibited superior learning relative to several control conditions that included learning-by-teaching elements but not recursive feedback. The second study examined the effect of popular design choices on recursive feedback during learning-by-teaching (e.g., customization, look-alike features). The customization condition involved tutoring a pupil avatar that the participant customized prior to the study and observing the pupil avatar answer questions. The doppelgänger look-alike condition involved tutoring a pupil avatar that looked like the participant and observing the pupil avatar answer questions. Results showed that conscious awareness of look-alike features and the extent to which one customizes the pupil avatar influences learning.     

Integrating vestibular displays for VE and airborne applications

Designing effective human machine interfaces is one of the more challenging and exciting issues facing engineers today. Many virtual environment (VE) designers approach this problem by examining the way humans interact with their natural environment. In essence, they have attempted to mimic the various ways humans use their senses to gather information. This approach seeks to present task relevant information in a form that is familiar, compellingly realistic, and intuitive. We have taken this design approach for the development of a direct vestibular display. We intend to provide self motion information to the vestibular system in a static virtual environment-that is, to simulate not only the look but also the feel of such sensations as turning and swaying. The article explains our rationale and method for doing so and reports results from our experiments using a visual vestibular interface     

Future multimedia user interfaces

No matter how powerful or elegant the technologies underlying multimedia computing, it is the user interface that ultimately determines how these systems will be used. We provide an overview of two emerging areas of user-interface research that will play major roles in future multimedia systems: virtual environments and ubiquitous computing. We discuss what they are and why they are important, and describe their relationship to current multimedia systems. While mouse and window-based user interfaces provide access to 2D graphics, video, and sound, virtual environments not only involve interactive 3D graphics, but further address all our senses through the use of spatial audio, haptics, and other modalities. While it is still a research goal to provide high-throughput video on demand, ubiquitous computing will require that multimedia network infrastructure also support extremely low-latency interaction among large numbers of mobile wireless users. To arrive at an understanding of the needs, capabilities, and potential of these new paradigms, we introduce their terminology and technology, and explain the basic system architectures being explored, leading up to a discussion of key current research issues and future directions.     

An Evolutionary Model of Price Competition Among Spatially Distributed Firms

Various studies have shown the emergence of cooperative behavior in evolutionary models with repeated local interaction among spatially distributed agents. We investigate to what extent these findings generalize to evolutionary models of price competition among spatially distributed firms. We consider both one- and two-dimensional models, and we vary the amount of information firms have about competitors in their neighborhood. Our computer simulations show that the emergence of cooperative behavior depends strongly on the amount of information available to firms. Firms tend to behave most cooperatively if they have only a very limited amount of information about their competitors. We provide an intuitive explanation for this phenomenon. Our simulations further indicate that three other factors in our models, namely the accuracy of firms’ information, the probability of experimentation, and the spatial distribution of consumers, have little effect on the emergence of cooperative behavior.     

Employing a recommendation expert system based on mental accounting and artificial neural networks into mining business intelligence for study abroad’s P/S recommendations

Successfully designing and positioning product/service will lead most enterprises to have the chance to keep the competitive advantages, and consumers also will have clear and strong preferences for product/service (P/S) during competitive environment. At Taiwan, study abroad service which being provided by travel agencies can be viewed as a new market during the recent years. Most travel agencies intend to develop the novel techniques and mine the useful business intelligence (BI) for improving their quality of P/S or adjusting their strategies of marketing. In this article, a recommendation expert system (ES) based on mental accounting and artificial neural networks (ANNs) is proposed to address the issue of BI mining. The travel agencies can obtain BI relating to consumers’ decision-making, consumers’ responses for different mental accounting and the recommended features for P/S by inputting referenced information into such recommendation ES. Finally, we also take an illustrative example owing to a local travel agency at Taiwan to demonstrate the feasibility and rationality of the proposed architecture.     

Writing power into online discussion

This article considers the way in which control of interaction emerges as a function of personal agency and external factors in a group of students engaged in online asynchronous text-based communication in a distance education program. It is structured around the argument that control is partly related to the power that individuals have to give effect to their wishes, but also acknowledges that this sense of agency is always in relation to the powers of others and more structural constraints. A picture emerges of the choices students make in deciding when to initiate discussion and respond to others, and about decisions concerning whose messages they would read and when. The impact of other students, of online groups, and instructors seems to play an important role in determining how participants participate in online interaction. Consideration of broader issues shows how the context in which students engage in interaction impacts the nature and extent of that interaction. The article concludes that being aware, and taking advantage of the socially grounded nature of online interaction provides the basis from which educators can act to ensure that interaction in online learning communities is enabling for the learning of all students.     

Self-organization of complex adaptive systems as a society of rational agents

In this paper, we aim at providing a general theoretical framework for designing complex adaptive systems as a society of rational agents. We term entities with their own interest agents. They are also rational in the sense that they only do what they want to do and what they think is in their own best interest. We formulate the dynamic interaction among those rational agents as competitive and cooperative problems. We obtain the equilibrium behavior in the long-run, and characterize the collective behavior of these rational agents. We show how complex collective behavior can emerge from the locally optimal behavior of each agent. We also describe why and how they organize themselves into a multilevel hierarchical organization with nesting structures. This work was presented, in part, at the Second International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Oita, Japan, February 18–20, 1997     

Fully Embodied Conversational Avatars: Making Communicative Behaviors Autonomous

Although avatars may resemble communicative interface agents, they have for the most part not profited from recent research into autonomous embodied conversational systems. In particular, even though avatars function within conversational environments (for example, chat or games), and even though they often resemble humans (with a head, hands, and a body) they are incapable of representing the kinds of knowledge that humans have about how to use the body during communication. Humans, however, do make extensive use of the visual channel for interaction management where many subtle and even involuntary cues are read from stance, gaze, and gesture. We argue that the modeling and animation of such fundamental behavior is crucial for the credibility and effectiveness of the virtual interaction in chat. By treating the avatar as a communicative agent, we propose a method to automate the animation of important communicative behavior, deriving from work in conversation and discourse theory. BodyChat is a system that allows users to communicate via text while their avatars automatically animate attention, salutations, turn taking, back-channel feedback, and facial expression. An evaluation shows that users found an avatar with autonomous conversational behaviors to be more natural than avatars whose behaviors they controlled, and to increase the perceived expressiveness of the conversation. Interestingly, users also felt that avatars with autonomous communicative behaviors provided a greater sense of user control.     

Interacting with parallel coordinates

Parallel coordinate visualizations have a reputation of being difficult to understand, expert-only representations. We argue that this reputation may be partially unfounded, because many of the parallel coordinate browser implementations lack essential features. This paper presents a survey of current interaction techniques for parallel coordinate browsers and compares them to the visualization design guidelines in the literature. In addition, we report our experiences with parallel coordinate browser prototypes, and describe an experiment where we studied the immediate usability of parallel coordinate visualizations. In the experiment, 16 database professionals performed a set of tasks both with the SQL query language and a parallel coordinate browser. The results show that although the subjects had doubts about the general usefulness of the parallel coordinate technique, they could perform the tasks more efficiently with a parallel coordinate browser than with their familiar query language interface.     

Evaluating the security of mobile agent platforms

Mobility of software agents requires additional security measures. While the theoretical aspects of mobile agent security have been widely studied, there are few studies about the security levels of current agent platforms. In this paper, test cases are proposed to assess agent platform security. These tests focus on malicious agents trying to attack other agents or the agency. Currently, they have been carried out for two agent platforms: JADE and SeMoA. These tests show which of the known theoretical security problems are relevant in practice. Furthermore, they reveal how these problems are addressed by the respective platform and what security flaws are present.     

Agency Effects in Human–Computer Interaction

The studies presented in this article explore a human-centered conceptualization of agents and agency based on the observation that people attribute agency to sufficiently complex interactive systems. Although agency attribution appears to be an unconscious human response, findings from social psychology, affective computing, and perceptual-motor studies suggest agency attribution influences human–computer interaction (HCI). Three studies are presented that examine whether recent findings on agency attribution in physical environments also apply in the virtual environments characteristic of HCI. Results of the studies indicate that agency effects operate in desktop computing environments. Agency effects, however, appear to be influenced by learning effects that preserve a previously observed relationship between perception and action but alter how this effect is expressed. Results suggest that there are both bottom-up and top-down contributions to agency effects in HCI.     

A Flexible Architecture for Virtual Humans in Networked Collaborative Virtual Environments

Complex virtual human representation provides more natural interaction and communication among participants in networked virtual environments, hence it is expected to increase the sense of being together within the same virtual world. We present a flexible framework for the integration of virtual humans in networked collaborative virtual environments. A modular architecture allows flexible representation and control of the virtual humans, whether they are controlled by a physical user using all sorts of tracking and other devices, or by an intelligent control program turning them into autonomous actors. The modularity of the system allows for fairly easy extensions and integration with new techniques making it interesting also as a testbed for various domains from “classic” VR to psychological experiments. We present results in terms of functionalities, example applications and measurements of performance and network traffic with an increasing number of participants in the simulation.     

FreeWalk: a social interaction platform for group behaviour in a virtual space

FreeWalk is a social interaction platform where people and agents can socially and spatially interact with one another. FreeWalk has evolved to support heterogeneous interaction styles including meetings, cross-cultural encounters, and evacuation drills. Each of them is usually supported by an individual virtual environment. This evolution extended the capability to control social interaction. The first prototype only provides people with an environment in which they can gather to talk with one another while the third prototype provides them with a whole situation to behave according to their assigned roles and tasks. FreeWalk1 is a spatial videoconferencing system. In this system, the positions of participants make spontaneous simultaneous conversations possible. Spatial movements are integrated with video-mediated communication. FreeWalk1 is able to make social interaction more casual and relaxed than telephone-like telecommunication media. In contrast to conventional videoconferencing systems, people formed concurrent multiple groups to greet and chat with others. In FreeWalk2, a social agent acts as an in-between of people to reduce the problem of the low social context in virtual spaces. When the agent notes an awkward pause in a conversation, it approaches those involved in the conversation with a suggestion for a new topic to talk about. We used this agent to support cross-cultural communication between Japan and US. Our agent strongly influenced people's impressions of their partners, and also, their stereotypes about their partner's nationality. FreeWalk3 is a virtual city simulator to conduct virtual evacuation drills. This system brings social interaction into crisis management simulation. People can join a virtual scene of a disaster at home. Social agents can also join to play their roles assigned by simulation designers. The system architecture has a split control interface to divide control of multiple agents into high-level instruction for them and simulation of their low-level actions. The interface helps simulation designers to control many agents efficiently.     

Google home: Experience, support and re-experience of social home activities

Ambient intelligence research is about ubiquitous computing and about social and intelligent properties of computer-supported environments. These properties aim at providing inhabitants or visitors of ambient intelligence environments with support in their activities. Activities include interactions between inhabitants and between inhabitants and (semi-) autonomous agents, including mobile robots, virtual humans and other smart objects in the environment. Providing real-time support requires understanding of behavior and activities. Clearly, being able to provide real-time support also allows us to provide off-line support, that is, intelligent off-line retrieval, summarizing, browsing and even replay, possibly in a transformed way, of stored information. Real-time remote access to these computer-supported environments also allows participation in activities and such participation as well can profit from the real-time capturing and interpretation of behavior and activities performed and supported by ambient intelligence technology. In this paper, we illustrate and support these observations by looking at results obtained in several European and US projects, in particular projects on smart environments, whether they are smart meetings or lecture rooms, smart offices or intelligently monitored events in public spaces. In particular, we look at the augmented multi-party interaction (AMI) project in which we are involved and we try to sketch a framework in which we can transform research results from the meeting context to the home environment context.     

An examination of children's learning progression shifts while using touch screen virtual manipulative mathematics apps

The purpose of this study was to examine shifts in young children's learning progression levels while they interacted with virtual manipulative mathematics apps on touch-screen devices. A total of 100 children participated in six mathematics learning sequences while using 18 virtual manipulative mathematics touch-screen apps during clinical interviews. Researchers developed a micro-scoring tool to analyze video data from two camera sources (i.e., GoPro camera, wall-mounted camera). Our results showed that it is possible to document evidence of shifts in children's learning progressions while they are interacting with mathematics apps on touch-screen devices. Our results also indicated patterns in the children's interactions that were related to the shifts in their learning progression levels. These results suggest that an open-ended number of tasks with a variety of representations and tasks at varying levels of difficulty led to children refining their understanding and shaping their concept image of mathematical ideas resulting in incremental shifts in learning. The results of this study have important implications about how mathematical tasks in touch-screen apps may prompt children's incremental learning progression shifts to occur, and thereby promote opportunities for learning. We propose that design features in mathematics apps can be created to support and encourage these learning shifts.