Publication details
Marcus or Mira - Investigating the Perception of Virtual Agent Gender in Virtual Reality Role Play-Training
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2022 |
| Type | Article in Proceedings |
| Conference | 28th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST '22) |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Web | https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3562939.3565629 |
| Doi | http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3562939.3565629 |
| Keywords | Training; Virtual Reality; Gender; Virtual Agents |
| Description | Immersive virtual training environments are used in various domains. In this work we focus on role-play training in virtual reality. In virtual role-play training conversations and interactions with virtual agents are often fundamental to the training. Therefore, the appearance and behavior of the agents plays an important role when designing role-play training. We focus on the gender appearance of agents, as gender is an important aspect for differentiation between characters. We conducted a study with 40 participants in which we investigated how agents gender appearance influences the perception of the agents´ personality traits and the self-perception of a participants’ assumed role in a training for social skills. This work contributes towards understanding the design-space of virtual agent design, virtual agent gender identity, and the design and development of immersive virtual reality role-play training. |