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Effects of Embodied Interface Agents and Their Gestural Activity

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 2792))

Abstract

A study is presented that addresses the question if embodied interface agents – compared to text and speech output – increase acceptance and effectiveness of a TV/VCR system and if their gestural activity modulates the effects. 106 participants were confronted with a VCR system equipped with either text output, speech output or an embodied interface agent showing normal gestures, no gestures or gestures that had been slightly dissynchronized from speech. Results show that participants experienced themselves as most entertained when confronted with an embodied agent, but that ratings of helpfulness were lower compared to audio and text version. Only few differences between the gesture conditions were obtained hinting to less gesture being evaluated slightly more positive. Implications for the future design of the agents’ nonverbal behavior are discussed.

This research was supported by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMB+F) within the project EMBASSI (Multimodal Assistance for Infotainment and Service Infrastructures, BMB+F grant number 01 IL 904 L).

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© 2003 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Krämer, N.C., Tietz, B., Bente, G. (2003). Effects of Embodied Interface Agents and Their Gestural Activity. In: Rist, T., Aylett, R.S., Ballin, D., Rickel, J. (eds) Intelligent Virtual Agents. IVA 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2792. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-39396-2_49

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-39396-2_49

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-20003-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-39396-2

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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