SPEAKER’S BEHAVIOR IN VIRTUAL REALITY (Methodology of the Experiment and Description of Preliminary Results)

Abstract

The article is a preliminary research that examines the methodology of the experiment devoted to the study of the speaker’s behavior in virtual reality (VR) and its results. The purpose of the experiment is to study the specific features of verbal and non-verbal implementation of the role and spatial deixis in VR. Based on the received reactions, the speaker’s coordinate system will be determined and models of the speaker’s communicative behavior in VR will be constructed. The article describes in detail the design of the experiment, which includes: stimulus material on the basis of which the VR scene is created; types of scenes used to determine the type of the speaker’s orientation; description of the tools by means of which VR is created; requirements for the selection of participants in the experiment; methods of recording material and the principles of its decoding. Special attention was paid to correlating the ‘external’ (gesture) and ‘internal’ (verbal) behavior of the speakers, to the principles of gesture fixation and their correlation with the subject’s verbal reactions to the presented scene. Based on the data obtained from the subjects, there was developed a classifier where the categories ‘Structure of the situation’, ‘Type of communication’ and ‘Means of communication’ and their subclasses are used. The data are entered into the Semograph information system and are visually presented in the form of a customizable interactive graph by using the SciVi software. At present, the reactions of two informants (a man and a woman) from the general sample have been processed. Based on the analysis of their reactions, preliminary results were obtained, which made it possible to demonstrate approaches to work with the classifier and to trace the representation of verbal and non-verbal means in the reactions of the subjects. Moreover, preliminary results help to determine the type of orientation and communicative behavior of the speaker depending on their personality and the type of scene. Preliminary analysis allows us to refine the principles of material processing, its annotation and entry into the Semograph system as well as working with the classifier.