A personality-based emotional model for embodied conversational agents: Effects on perceived social presence and game experience of users

This paper reports on an experiment that investigates the effect of interacting with a personality-driven embodied conversational agent (ECA) on the perceived social presence and game experience of people in a VR social simulator. Furthermore, the dynamics between the different metrics of game experience and social presence of people are explored to determine which game experience metrics are the strongest predictors of perceived social presence in this context. A personality-based emotional model is used for personifying the employed ECA, which governs the manifestation of its non-verbal behaviors. Three experimental conditions manipulating the existence and intensity of non-verbal behaviors exhibited by the ECA were used to investigate the effect of this proposed approach. The results of the experiment with 41 participants indicate that people who were exposed to an extrovert ECA experienced significantly higher levels of behavioral involvement as part of their social presence compared to the other conditions. These results suggest that incorporating personality by means of non-verbal behavior in the emotional model of an ECA influences users perceived feeling of social presence. Furthermore, our results reveal that there is a bidirectional relationship between game experience metrics and perceived social presence of people as each predict the other.