The Impact of a Mixed Reality Display Configuration on User Behavior with a Virtual Human

Understanding the human-computer interface factors that influence users’ behavior with virtual humans will enable more effective human-virtual human encounters. This paper presents experimental evidence that using a mixed reality display configuration can result in significantly different behavior with a virtual human along important social dimensions. The social dimensions we focused on were engagement, empathy, pleasantness, and naturalness. To understand how these social constructs could be influenced by display configuration, we video recorded the verbal and non-verbal response behavior to stimuli from a virtual human under two fundamentally different display configurations. One configuration presented the virtual human at life-size and was embedded into the environment, and the other presented the virtual human using a typical desktop configuration. We took multiple independent measures of participant response behavior using a video coding instrument. Analysis of these measures demonstrate that display configuration was a statistically significant multivariate factor along all dimensions.