An Empirical Investigation of the Impact of an Embodied Conversational Agent on the User's Perception and Performance with a Route-Finding Application

Abstract

This article presents the design and evaluation of a gamified mobile tour guide prototype for route-finding in historical attractions. The mobile tour guide prototype uses photographs of landmarks carefully chosen to guide visitors on routes of cultural interest in the castle. It also features a fully multimodal interface using an Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA). The authors compared the impact of the multimodal interface to a non-multimodal control (narrated text) for the same navigational tasks. Participants experienced routes of variable difficulty (simple vs complex) in the lab under simulated mobile conditions. The experimental results substantiated aspects of the ECA-based interface related to visitors' subjective experiences, but not objective task performance. Finally, the authors discuss future work which will focus on running the second round of evaluations in the field with an improved version of the prototype, demonstrating features such as user planned routes and route re-calculation.