Emotional virtual crowd on task completion in virtual markets

Abstract

This paper studies the effects of a virtual crowd with emotion on task completion in a virtual market. The users have to interact with the virtual agents so that the virtual agents are willing to lead the users to specific vendors. Then, the users can buy the required items. The users communicate with the virtual agents via a conversation dialog. The emotional agents' moods are affected by their own interaction (e.g., collision) while they are walking. Furthermore, their moods are also affected by the conversational responses of the users. We adopt a simple 2D mood model and use icons to represent the mood states of the agents. The mood model supports four mood states, which are "Excitement", "Anger", "Sadness", and "Neutral". We conducted a user study to evaluate the effects of the emotional virtual agents in different aspects, including task completion, time spent in conversation, following distance, and realism of the emotional virtual crowd.

Simulation of Emotional Crowd and Applications

“…Emotional crowd enriches crowd behaviors and has a wide range of applications in games, movies, and disaster simulation. Emotional crowds have been adopted in evaluating task performance of users in virtual reality (Huang and Wong 2018;Volonte et al 2020).…”

Crowd Navigation in VR: Exploring Haptic Rendering of Collisions

“…Nevertheless, VR opens large perspectives in the design of new experiments for understanding pedestrian behaviours. For examples, having only one participant at the same time, researchers were able to evaluate the effect of specific factors such as emotions of the crowd on participant behaviours and proxemics [7], [23], [49] or the effect of density on gaze behaviour [3], user experience [19] as well as navigation strategies when facing a group of moving people (i.e., going around or going through the group) [9].…”

Interaction with proactive and reactive agents in box manipulation tasks in virtual environments

“…Human–agent interaction. A large amount of studies report various approaches for human–agent interaction, including conversational agents, emotional agents, virtual peers, and communication based on natural languages . A virtual selling agent can be proactive and adaptive .…”

“…Human–agent interaction and collaboration are ubiquitous in virtual or real environments. Various kinds of studies have been investigated in virtual environments, such as virtual peers, proactive and adaptive selling agents, emotional contagion, multiple interactions, and emotional agents . This paper studies the experience of users in collaboration tasks with virtual agents.…”

“…Various kinds of studies have been investigated in virtual environments, such as virtual peers, 1 proactive and adaptive selling agents, 2 emotional contagion, 3 multiple interactions, 4 and emotional agents. 5 This paper studies the experience of users in collaboration tasks with virtual agents. The agents can be proactive or reactive.…”