Simulated Social Touch in a Collaborative Game

In this paper we present a study in which participants played a collaborative augmented reality game together with two virtual agents, visible in the same augmented reality space. During interaction one of the virtual agents touches the user on the arm, by means of a vibrotactile display. We investigated whether social touch by a virtual agent in a collaborative setting would positively influence the participant’s perception of this touching virtual agent. Results showed that the touching virtual agent was rated higher on affective adjectives than the non-touching agent.

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