Persuasion Experiment
This study examines the roles of gender and visual realism in the persuasiveness of speakers. Participants were presented with a persuasive passage delivered by a male or female person, virtual human, or virtual character. They were then assessed on attitude change and their ratings of the argument, message, and speaker. The results indicated that the virtual speakers were as effective at changing attitudes as real people. Male participants were more persuaded when the speaker was female than when the speaker was male, whereas female participants were more persuaded when the speaker was male than when the speaker was female. Cross gender interactions occurred across all conditions, suggesting that some of the gender stereotypes that occur with people may carry over to interaction with virtual characters. Ratings of the perceptions of the speaker were more favorable for virtual speakers than for human speakers. We discuss the application of these findings in the design of persuasive human computer interfaces.
This figure illustrates the level of persuasion by topic and speaker
Publications
- Zanbaka, C., Goolkasian, P., Hodges, L. F. "Can a virtual cat persuade you? The role of gender and realism in speaker persuasiveness." In Proceedings of CHI 2006, ACM Press (2006), 1153-1162. PDF
Social Facilitation and Inhibition Experiments
Do human-human social interactions carry over to human-virtual human social interactions? How does this affect future interface designers? We replicated classical tests of social influence known as the social facilitation and inhibition effects. Social facilitation/inhibition theory states that when in the presence of others, people perform simple tasks better and complex tasks worse. Participants were randomly assigned to perform both simple and complex tasks alone and in the presence of either a real human, a projected virtual human, or a virtual human in a head-mounted display. Our results showed participants were inhibited by the presence of others, whether real or virtual. That is, participants performed worse on the complex task, both in terms of percent correct and reaction times, when in the presence of others than when alone. Social facilitation did not occur with the real or virtual human. We discuss these results and their implications for future interface designers.
These figures illustrate a participant completing the task with a real audience, a virtual audience, and view of virtual audience in the Virtual Human Immersive condition
Publications
- Zanbaka, C., Ulinski, A., Goolkasian, P., Hodges, L. F. (2004). "Effects of Virtual Human Presence on Task Performance," In Proceeding of the International Conference on Artificial Reality and Telexistence (ICAT), pp. 174-181. PDF
- Zanbaka, C., Ulinski, A., Goolkasian, P., Hodges, L. F. "Social responses to virtual humans: Implications for future interface design." Honorable Mention for Best of CHI Award. In Proceedings of CHI 2007, ACM Press (2007) , 1561 - 1570. PDF
Personality Experiment
In this study, participants were asked to spend about ten minutes with a projected life-sized virtual human. The virtual human interacted with the participants by speaking to them and exhibited three different tones of voice and facial expressions corresponding to a happy, sleepy, or grumpy personality. The virtual human asked participants to help her with a visual memory task where they responded, via keyboard, to a series of question sets about various pictures. We hypothesized that the virtual human's personality will have an effect on the amount of time participants are willing to help the virtual human on a task. In the results of our preliminary experiment, the personality of the virtual human had no effect on interaction time. First, we summarize the study and results, next we discuss some of the probable causes of our results, and finally we outline the lessons learned.
This figure illustrates Happy, sleepy, and grumpy Diana
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These figures show a sample picture from the set of pictures and a display of multiple choice answers for question: "What did the sign on the tree say?"
Publications
- Zanbaka, C., Lok, B., Goolkasian, P., Hodges, L. F. "Lessons Learned in Assessing Human-Virtual Human Interaction". Advances in Virtual Environments Technology: Musings on Design, Evaluation, & Applications, (K. M. Stanney (Ed.)), Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associate, 2005.
- Zanbaka, C., Lok, B., Goolkasian, P., Hodges, L. F., (2005). "Lessons Learned in Assessing Human-Virtual Human Interaction." First International Conference on Virtual Reality, Las Vegas, Nevada 22 - 27 July. PDF
