Exploring the effects of observed physicality conflicts on real-virtual human interaction in augmented reality

Abstract

Augmented reality (AR) enables the illusion of computer-generated virtual objects and humans co-existing with us in the real world. Virtual humans (VHs) in AR can further induce an illusion of physicality in the real world due to their form of presentation and their behavior, such as showing awareness of their surroundings. However, certain behaviors can cause a conflict that breaks this illusion, for example, when we see a VH passing through a physical object. In this paper we describe a human-subject study that we performed to test the hypothesis that participants experience higher copresence in conflict-free circumstances, and we investigate the magnitude of this effect and behavioral manifestations. Participants perceived a social situation in a room that they shared with a VH as seen through a HoloLens head-mounted display. The behavior of the VH either caused conflicts with (occupied the same space as) physical entities, or avoided them. Our results show that the conflicts in physicality significantly reduced subjective reports of copresence. Moreover, we observed that participants were more likely to cause a conflict (occupy the same space as) virtual entities in case the VH had avoided the conflict. We discuss implications for future research and shared AR setups with real-virtual human interactions.