Intelligent Blended Agents: Reality–Virtuality Interaction with Artificially Intelligent Embodied Virtual Humans

Abstract

Intelligent virtual agents (VAs) already support us in a variety of everyday tasks such as setting up appointments, monitoring our fitness, and organizing messages. Adding a humanoid body representation to these mostly voice-based VAs has enormous potential to enrich the human–agent communication process but, at the same time, raises expectations regarding the agent’s social, spatial, and intelligent behavior. Embodied VAs may be perceived as less human-like if they, for example, do not return eye contact, or do not show a plausible collision behavior with the physical surroundings. In this article, we introduce a new model that extends human-to-human interaction to interaction with intelligent agents and covers different multi-modal and multi-sensory channels that are required to create believable embodied VAs. Theoretical considerations of the different aspects of human–agent interaction are complemented by implementation guidelines to support the practical development of such agents. In this context, we particularly emphasize one aspect that is distinctive of embodied agents, i.e., interaction with the physical world. Since previous studies indicated negative effects of implausible physical behavior of VAs, we were interested in the initial responses of users when interacting with a VA with virtual–physical capabilities for the first time. We conducted a pilot study to collect subjective feedback regarding two forms of virtual–physical interactions. Both were designed and implemented in preparation of the user study, and represent two different approaches to virtual–physical manipulations: (i) displacement of a robotic object, and (ii) writing on a physical sheet of paper with thermochromic ink. The qualitative results of the study indicate positive effects of agents with virtual–physical capabilities in terms of their perceived realism as well as evoked emotional responses of the users. We conclude with an outlook on possible future developments of different aspects of human–agent interaction in general and the physical simulation in particular.