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Looking the Part: The Effect of Attire and Setting on Perceptions of a Virtual Health Counselor

Published: 05 November 2018 Publication History

Abstract

The visual design of virtual agents and scenes presents developers with a plethora of choices. We conducted two studies in which we manipulated the design of a virtual health counselor agent's attire and its virtual environment. Our studies demonstrate that virtual agents dressed to fit their health care role are perceived to be more professional, trustworthy, reassuring, and more persuasive regarding medical decisions, compared to agents whose appearance is not role-appropriate. Furthermore, the effect of an agent's attire is greater than that of its virtual environment. The results of this research can help create visual guidelines for the development of virtual agents in tasks that rely on user trust.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      IVA '18: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents
      November 2018
      381 pages
      ISBN:9781450360135
      DOI:10.1145/3267851
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Publication History

      Published: 05 November 2018

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      Author Tags

      1. Agent Appearance
      2. Agent Perception
      3. ECAs
      4. Virtual Agents

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      IVA '18
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      IVA '18: International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents
      November 5 - 8, 2018
      NSW, Sydney, Australia

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      IVA '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 17 of 82 submissions, 21%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 53 of 196 submissions, 27%

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      Cited By

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      • (2025)Usability, acceptance, and the role of realism in virtual humans for breathing exercise trainingScientific Reports10.1038/s41598-024-82886-715:1Online publication date: 9-Jan-2025
      • (2024)Evaluating the Effect of Outfit on Personality Perception in Virtual CharactersVirtual Worlds10.3390/virtualworlds30100023:1(21-39)Online publication date: 4-Jan-2024
      • (2024)Exploring the Effects of User-Agent and User-Designer Similarity in Virtual Human Design to Promote Mental Health Intentions for College StudentsACM Transactions on Applied Perception10.1145/368982222:1(1-41)Online publication date: 28-Nov-2024
      • (2024)Effects of Gender Synchrony in User-Agent Interactions: Integrating the Designer as a Product Cue in Virtual Human Design for Mental Health SupportProceedings of the 12th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction10.1145/3687272.3688326(123-131)Online publication date: 24-Nov-2024
      • (2024)Lies, Deceit, and Hallucinations: Player Perception and Expectations Regarding Trust and Deception in GamesProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642253(1-15)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
      • (2024)Designing Interactive Agents to Support Emotion Regulation in the Workplace through Guided Art-MakingCompanion of the 2024 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction10.1145/3610978.3640600(257-262)Online publication date: 11-Mar-2024
      • (2024)Initial Investigations into Information Retention and Perception on Virtual Human Race2024 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW)10.1109/VRW62533.2024.00335(1078-1079)Online publication date: 16-Mar-2024
      • (2024)Exploring how politeness impacts the user experience of chatbots for mental health supportInternational Journal of Human-Computer Studies10.1016/j.ijhcs.2023.103181184:COnline publication date: 1-Apr-2024
      • (2023)Embodying a Virtual Agent in a Self-Driving CarInternational Journal of Mobile Human Computer Interaction10.4018/IJMHCI.33054215:1(1-18)Online publication date: 21-Sep-2023
      • (2023)A Digital Coach to Promote Emotion Regulation SkillsMultimodal Technologies and Interaction10.3390/mti70600577:6(57)Online publication date: 29-May-2023
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