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PuzzleAide: Comparing Audio and Embodied Assistants for MR Puzzle-Solving

Published: 07 October 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Conversational Virtual Agents (CVA) have great potential to assist users in their task performance. Whether these agents need to be embodied or not was the main research question of the present pilot study. To answer this question, we designed and developed a Mixed Reality (MR) application for solving a physical puzzle while interacting with a CVA. Eleven participants took part in our between-subject pilot study and interacted with two different representations of a CVA (i.e., voice-only and embodied agent). In this short paper, we descriptively report on the participants’ problem-solving time, the number of assistance requests they made to the CVAs, and the social presence they perceived while doing so.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SUI '24: Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Symposium on Spatial User Interaction
October 2024
396 pages
ISBN:9798400710889
DOI:10.1145/3677386
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all 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 third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Published: 07 October 2024

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Author Tags

  1. Conversational Virtual Agent (CVA)
  2. Human-agent Interaction
  3. Mixed Reality (MR)
  4. Puzzle Solving
  5. Spatial Tasks

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