Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 2002
This paper describes an experiment to assess the anxiety responses of people giving 5 min. presen... more This paper describes an experiment to assess the anxiety responses of people giving 5 min. presentations to virtual audiences consisting of eight male avatars. There were three different types of audience behavior: an emotionally neutral audience that remained static throughout the talk, a positive audience that exhibited friendly and appreciative behavior towards the speaker, and a negative audience that exhibited hostile and bored expressions throughout the talk. A second factor was immersion: half of the forty subjects experienced the virtual seminar room through a head-tracked, head-mounted display and the remainder on a desktop system. Responses were measured using the standard Personal Report of Confidence as a Public Speaker (PRCS), which was elicited prior to the experiment and after each talk. Several other standard psychological measures such as SCL-90-R (for screening for psychological disorder), the SAD, and the FNE were also measured prior to the experiment. Other respo...
Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 2005
This paper presents an experiment investigating the impact of behavior and responsiveness on soci... more This paper presents an experiment investigating the impact of behavior and responsiveness on social responses to virtual humans in an immersive virtual environment (IVE). A number of responses are investigated, including presence, copresence, and two physiological responses—heart rate and electrodermal activity (EDA). Our findings suggest that increasing agents' responsiveness even on a simple level can have a significant impact on certain aspects of people's social responses to human-oid agents. Despite being aware that the agents were computer-generated, participants with higher levels of social anxiety were significantly more likely to avoid “disturbing” them. This suggests that on some level people can respond to virtual humans as social actors even in the absence of complex interaction. Responses appear to be shaped both by the agents' behaviors and by people's expectations of the technology. Participants experienced a significantly higher sense of personal cont...
Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 2002
This paper describes an experiment to assess the anxiety responses of people giving 5 min. presen... more This paper describes an experiment to assess the anxiety responses of people giving 5 min. presentations to virtual audiences consisting of eight male avatars. There were three different types of audience behavior: an emotionally neutral audience that remained static throughout the talk, a positive audience that exhibited friendly and appreciative behavior towards the speaker, and a negative audience that exhibited hostile and bored expressions throughout the talk. A second factor was immersion: half of the forty subjects experienced the virtual seminar room through a head-tracked, head-mounted display and the remainder on a desktop system. Responses were measured using the standard Personal Report of Confidence as a Public Speaker (PRCS), which was elicited prior to the experiment and after each talk. Several other standard psychological measures such as SCL-90-R (for screening for psychological disorder), the SAD, and the FNE were also measured prior to the experiment. Other respo...
Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 2005
This paper presents an experiment investigating the impact of behavior and responsiveness on soci... more This paper presents an experiment investigating the impact of behavior and responsiveness on social responses to virtual humans in an immersive virtual environment (IVE). A number of responses are investigated, including presence, copresence, and two physiological responses—heart rate and electrodermal activity (EDA). Our findings suggest that increasing agents' responsiveness even on a simple level can have a significant impact on certain aspects of people's social responses to human-oid agents. Despite being aware that the agents were computer-generated, participants with higher levels of social anxiety were significantly more likely to avoid “disturbing” them. This suggests that on some level people can respond to virtual humans as social actors even in the absence of complex interaction. Responses appear to be shaped both by the agents' behaviors and by people's expectations of the technology. Participants experienced a significantly higher sense of personal cont...
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Papers by David Pertaub