Perception of Spatial Relations and of Coexistence with Virtual Agents

This paper focuses on the user’s perception of virtual agents embedded in real and virtual worlds. In particular, we analyze the perception of spatial relations and the perception of coexistence. For this purpose, we measure the user’s voice compensation which is one of the human automatic behaviors to their surrounding environment. The results of our evaluation study reveal that people compensate their voice according to the distance during the interaction with both augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) based agents. Secondly, in AR-based scenario users perceive stronger the distance between them and the virtual agent. On the other hand, the results do not show any significant differences regarding the notion of coexistence of the user. Finally, we discuss our results in the context of sense of presence in interaction with virtual agent in AR applications.