Evaluating Presence Strategies of Temporarily Required Virtual Assistants

Computer-controlled virtual humans can serve as assistants in virtual scenes. Here, they are usually in an almost constant contact with the user. Nonetheless, in some applications assistants are required only temporarily. Consequently, presenting them only when needed, i.e, minimizing their presence time, might be advisable. To the best of our knowledge, there do not yet exist any design guidelines for such agent-based support systems. Thus, we plan to close this gap by a controlled qualitative and quantitative user study in a CAVE-like environment. We expect users to prefer assistants with a low presence time as well as a low fallback time to get quick support. However, as both factors are linked, a suitable trade-off needs to be found. Thus, we plan to test four different strategies, namely fading, moving, omnipresent and busy. This work presents our hypotheses and our planned within-subject design.