Persuading people in a remote destination to sing by beaming there

Abstract

We built a Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) allowing one person, the 'visitor' to be digitally transported to a remote destination to interact with local people there. This included full body tracking, vibrotactile feedback and voice. This allowed interactions in the same CVE between multiple people situated in different physical remote locations. This system was used for an experiment to study whether the conveyance of touch has an impact on the willingness of participants embodied in the CVE to sing in public. In a first experimental condition, the experimenter virtually touched the avatar of the participants on the shoulder, producing vibrotactile feedback. In another condition using the identical physical setup, the vibrotactile displays were not activated, so that they would not feel the touch. Our hypothesis was that the tactile touch condition would produce a greater likelihood of compliance with the request to sing. In a second part we examined the hypothesis that people might be more willing to sing (execute an embarrassing task) in a CVE, because of the anonymity provided by virtual reality. Hence we carried out a similar study in physical reality. The results suggest that the tactile intervention had no effect on the sensations of body ownership, presence or the behaviours of the participants, in spite of the finding that the sensation of touch itself was effectively realised. Moreover we found an overall similarity in responses between the VR and real conditions.