Abstract
Recently, artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled virtual humans have been widely used in various fields in our everyday lives, such as for museum exhibitions and as information guides. Given the continued technological innovations in extended reality (XR), immersive display devices and interaction methods are evolving to provide a feeling of togetherness with a virtual human, termed co-presence. With regard to such technical developments, one main concern is how to improve the experience through the sense of co-presence as felt by participants. However, virtual human systems still have limited guidelines on effective methods, and there is a lack of research on how to visualize and interact with virtual humans. In this paper, we report a novel method to support a strong sense of co-presence with a virtual human, and we investigated the effects on co-presence with a comparison of display and interaction types. We conducted the experiment according to a specified scenario between the participant and the virtual human, and our experimental study showed that subjects who participated in an immersive 3D display with non-verbal interaction felt the greatest co-presence. Our results are expected to provide guidelines on how to focus on constructing AI-based interactive virtual humans.
Highlights
In the days ahead, the influence of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), commonly referred to as extended reality (XR) in brief, is expected to grow rapidly
With the development of collaborative virtual environments (CVEs), online games, and the increasing popularity of metaverses, virtual humans are becoming even more important, and this technology allows participants to interact with virtual humans as if they are present in the same room [8,9]
A virtual human is an output form of computer systems that strive to engage with participants through natural language interfaces and non-verbal interaction, which can be performed with facial expressions and gestures [25,26], and the virtual human provides a response to the real person who interacts with it
Summary
The influence of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), commonly referred to as extended reality (XR) in brief, is expected to grow rapidly. With the development of collaborative virtual environments (CVEs), online games, and the increasing popularity of metaverses, virtual humans are becoming even more important, and this technology allows participants to interact with virtual humans as if they are present in the same room [8,9]. Despite such provisions, virtual human systems still have limited guidelines on effective methods, and there is a lack of research on how to visualize and interact with virtual humans. It remains to be determined how these research results should be configured to achieve the highest level of co-presence with the virtual human to enhance the effect
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