On the Effect of a Personality-Driven ECA on Perceived Social Presence and Game Experience in VR

We report on an experiment that investigates the effect of a personality-driven embodied conversational agent (ECA) on perceived social presence and game experience in virtual reality. The experiment used three conditions: one with no apparent non-verbal behavior by the ECA, one with non-verbal behavior governed by an extrovert-based emotional model, and one with an introvert-based emotional model, in the context of negative evaluation of a virtual employee's performance. The results indicate that the overall perceived social presence and game experience across all conditions were quite high. Moreover, people who were exposed to the extrovert-based condition experienced significantly higher levels of behavioral involvement as part of their social presence compared to the other two conditions. Furthermore, no significant differences between the game experience of participants across the different conditions were observed. These results suggest that the projection of non-verbal behavior as a result of incorporating personality as part of the emotional model of an ECA could have an influence on the elicited feeling of social presence from the users with respect to behavioral involvement; and more assertive and pronounced non-verbal behaviors seem to have higher impacts, than their submissive and minimal counterparts.