Multimodal Cues of the Sense of Presence and Co-presence in Human-Virtual Agent Interaction

Magalie Ochs (1, 2, 3) , Jeremie Bousquet (3, 2, 1) , Philippe Blache (4, 2)

1 LIS - Laboratoire d'Informatique et des Systèmes (LIS) (Marseille, Toulon)
2 AMU - Aix Marseille Université
3 R2I - Recherche d’information et Interactions
4 LPL - Laboratoire Parole et Langage

A key challenge when studying human-agent interaction is the evaluation of user's experience. In virtual reality, this question is addressed by studying the sense of "presence" and"co-presence", generally assessed thanks to well-grounded subjective post-experience questionnaires. In this article, we aim at exploring behavioral measures of presence and co-presence by analyzing multimodal cues produced during an interaction both by the user and the virtual agent. In our study, we started from a corpus of human-agent interaction collected in a task-oriented context: a virtual environment aiming at training doctors to break bad news to a patient (played by a virtual agent). Based on this corpus, we have used machine learning algorithms to explore the possibility of predicting user's sense of presence and co-presence. In particular, we have applied and compared two techniques, Random forest and SVM, both showing very good results in predicting the level of presence and co-presence.

Mots clés: Presence; Virtual Reality; Co-presence; Multimodal behavior; Virtual patient

Domaines: Intelligence artificielle [cs.AI]; Interface homme-machine [cs.HC]; Modélisation et simulation

Magalie Ochs, Jeremie Bousquet, Philippe Blache. Multimodal Cues of the Sense of Presence and Co-presence in Human-Virtual Agent Interaction. ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA), Jul 2019, Paris, France. pp.218-220, ⟨10.1145/3308532.3329438⟩. ⟨hal-02355255⟩