Understanding The Influence of Agency and Anthropomorphism on Copresence, Social Presence and Physical Presence With Virtual Humans

Introduction The growth of the Internet, the diffusion of access to technology, and boosts in bandwidth, have facilitated people's ability to increasingly use telecommunication technologies to create and maintain both business and social Kiesler, & McGuier, 1986). More people are using the environments to maintain a broader range of social relationships. People have not only responded socially to one another across mediated channels, but they have also responded socially to environments include social interactions with other humans and with the computers themselves. Thus, networked virtual environments are social; they are also " places. " This study focused on social interaction in visual virtual environments. These environments are designed to transmit a strong sense of being inside the media created, or virtual, environment. But more importantly the visual and spatial components of the environments support the creation of mental models of those one interacts with in the environment. The environments facilitate the design and use of computer graphic representations of the other (i.e., avatar) and include text or voice interaction in a spatial environment. These places are increasingly inhabited by virtual humans, visual computer representations of both human and Anthropomorphism and Agency in Virtual Humans p. 2 non-human entities in games, online shopping environments, and educational simulations (Cassell, Sullivan, Prevost, & Churchill, 2000). In this sense, virtual images are computer graphic representations that embody or represent an entity as it interacts with a user in cyberspace. Virtual images represent virtual humans in computer mediated interactions. Virtual humans differ from one another in a variety of ways along a number of dimensions. This study focused on two dimensions that have important theoretical implications, agency and anthropomorphism. The philosophical and psychological concept of agency has many subtle dimensions but most conceptualizations tap the core concept of the volitional or intentional force that drives the actions of an entity. IN networked virtual environments, the term agent has been used to describe an entity whose actions are controlled by the computer itself. Recent advances in artificial intelligence have begun to blur the distinction between human-human and human computer interactions as computer programs, or 'bots' have increasingly been able to do a wide range of tasks virtual human controlled by a human in real time is labeled " avatar, " but it would be labeled an " agent " if an artificial intelligence or a computer controlled it. Of course, the control over the graphic representation …