How Face Display and Clothing Affect User Impressions of Robotic Virtual Reality Agents Introducing Products

Abstract: This study investigated the effects of adding faces and clothing to robotic virtual reality (VR) agents that introduce users to products within a VR space on the users’ evaluative impressions. Research has shown that users expect human-like behavior and social cues when interacting with computers. Furthermore, human-like agents in VR environments have been shown to evoke positive impressions and encourage prosocial behavior. In this study, we designed moderately human-like VR agents to encourage favorable product impressions. The literature on human-like agents has reported that robotic agents can effectively temper user expectations, while computer graphics (CG) animated agents excel at building user trust. In our earlier study, we found that users have a more positive impression of the product guidance by CG animated agents compared with that from robotic agents. However, we argue that each design has unique strengths and that the blanket dismissal of robotic agents is unwarranted. Therefore, we explored the potential of enhancing user impressions by incorporating CG animated features into robotic agents. Specifically, this study focused on “face display” and “clothing” as important human-like components and investigated the effect of these components on users’ evaluative impressions of robotic VR agents. In this experiment, robotic agents were presented in six conditions based on their face display (i.e., absent face and present face) and clothing (i.e., none, female clothing, and male clothing). The participants evaluated the robotic VR agents in each condition based on their impressions of their human-like and friendly qualities. The agent’s face was designed to be neutral, with minimal emotional expression, and consisted of simple geometric shapes. We chose student uniforms as clothing because the participants were likely to be familiar with them. In all conditions, the VR agent performed motions, such as bowing and pointing to products, and providing voice guidance. Twelve male participants (average age, 22.6 years) took part in this experiment. They wore the HTC VIVE Pro Eye to observe the VR agent introducing the product. The analysis of variance results for the participants’ subjective evaluations revealed a significant main effect for face display (F = 6.159, p < .016) and clothing (F = 12.419, p < .000) on their impressions of the human-like agent. Multiple comparisons indicated that the absence of a face was rated as more human-like (p < .048) and that wearing male clothing significantly increased the human-like impression of the robotic VR agent compared with none (p < .000). A significant trend (F = 3.567, p < .063) was observed for the main effect of face display on the impression of friendliness. These results suggest that incorporating male clothing into the design of robotic VR agents can enhance their human-like impressions. However, the results also suggested that very human-like agent designs are not always desirable. For example, agents with faces can potentially reduce their human-like impression. It is anticipated that these findings will contribute to the design of robotic VR agents that are perceived by users as being more human-like.

Keywords: Virtual reality, Robotic agent, Affective engineering, User impressions, Human-like, Friendly qualities, Face display, Clothing

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1006008

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