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Who, Me? How Virtual Agents Can Shape Conversational Footing in Virtual Reality

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Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 10498))

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Abstract

The nonverbal behaviors of conversational partners reflect their conversational footing, signaling who in the group are the speakers, addressees, bystanders, and overhearers. Many applications of virtual reality (VR) will involve multiparty conversations with virtual agents and avatars of others where appropriate signaling of footing will be critical. In this paper, we introduce computational models of gaze and spatial orientation that a virtual agent can use to signal specific footing configurations. An evaluation of these models through a user study found that participants conformed to conversational roles signaled by the agent and contributed to the conversation more as addressees than as bystanders. We observed these effects in immersive VR, but not on a 2D display, suggesting an increased sensitivity to virtual agents’ footing cues in VR-based interfaces.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, USA

    Tomislav Pejsa, Michael Gleicher & Bilge Mutlu

Authors
  1. Tomislav Pejsa
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  2. Michael Gleicher
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  3. Bilge Mutlu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Tomislav Pejsa .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

    Jonas Beskow

  2. KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

    Christopher Peters

  3. Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

    Ginevra Castellano

  4. Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

    Carol O'Sullivan

  5. KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

    Iolanda Leite

  6. University of Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany

    Stefan Kopp

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Pejsa, T., Gleicher, M., Mutlu, B. (2017). Who, Me? How Virtual Agents Can Shape Conversational Footing in Virtual Reality. In: Beskow, J., Peters, C., Castellano, G., O'Sullivan, C., Leite, I., Kopp, S. (eds) Intelligent Virtual Agents. IVA 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10498. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67401-8_45

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67401-8_45

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-67400-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-67401-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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