Avatar Visual Similarity for Social HCI: Increasing Self-Awareness

Self-awareness is a critical factor in social human-human interaction and, hence, in social HCI interaction. Increasing self-awareness through mirrors or video recordings is common in face-to-face trainings, since it influences antecedents of self-awareness like explicit identification and implicit affective identification (affinity). However, increasing self-awareness has been scarcely examined in virtual trainings with virtual avatars, which allow for adjusting the similarity, e.g. to avoid negative effects of self-consciousness. Automatic visual similarity in avatars is an open issue related to high costs. It is important to understand which features need to be manipulated and which degree of similarity is necessary for self-awareness to leverage the added value of using avatars for self-awareness. This article examines the relationship between avatar visual similarity and increasing self-awareness in virtual training environments. We define visual similarity based on perceptually important facial features for human-human identification and develop a theory-based methodology to systematically manipulate visual similarity of virtual avatars and support self-awareness. Three personalized versions of virtual avatars with varying degrees of visual similarity to participants were created (weak, medium and strong facial features manipulation). In a within-subject study (N=33), we tested effects of degree of similarity on perceived similarity, explicit identification and implicit affective identification (affinity). Results show significant differences between the weak similarity manipulation, and both the strong manipulation and the random avatar for all three antecedents of self-awareness. An increasing degree of avatar visual similarity influences antecedents of self-awareness in virtual environments.

Towards social embodied cobots: The integration of an industrial cobot with a social virtual agent

The integration of the physical capabilities of an industrial collaborative robot with a social virtual character may represent a viable solution to enhance the workers' perception of the system as an embodied social entity and increase social engagement and well-being at the workplace. An online study was setup using prerecorded video interactions in order to pilot potential advantages of different embodied configurations of the cobot-avatar system in terms of perceptions of Social Presence, cobot-avatar Unity and Social Role of the system, and explore the relation of these. In particular, two different configurations were explored and compared: the virtual character was displayed either on a tablet strapped onto the base of the cobot or on a large TV screen positioned at the back of the workcell. The results imply that participants showed no clear preference based on the constructs, and both configurations fulfill these basic criteria. In terms of the relations between the constructs, there were strong correlations between perception of Social Presence, Unity and Social Role (Collegiality). This gives a valuable insight into the role of these constructs in the perception of cobots as embodied social entities, and towards building cobots that support well-being at the workplace.