The Influence of Real Human Personality on Social Presence with a Virtual Human in Augmented Reality

Human responses to an interaction with a Virtual Human (VH) can be influenced by both external factors such as technology-related limitations, and internal factors such as individual differences in personality. While the impacts of external factors have been studied widely, and are typically controlled for in application scenarios, less attention has been devoted to the impacts of internal factors. We present the results of a human-subject experiment where we investigated a particular internal factor: the effects of extraversion-introversion traits of participants on the sense of social presence with a VH in an Augmented Reality (AR) setting. Our results indicate a positive association between a condition where the VH proactively requests help from the participant, and participants indicating higher social presence with the VH, regardless of their personality. However, we also found that extraverted participants tended to report higher social presence with the VH, compared to the introverted participants. In addition, there were differences in the duration of when the participants were looking at the VH during the interaction according to their extraversion-introversion traits. Our results suggest that a real human's personality plays a significant role in interactions with a VH, and thus should be considered when carrying out such experiments that include measures of the effects of controlled manipulations on interactions with a VH. We present the details of our experiment and discuss the findings and potential implications related to human perceptions and behaviors with a VH.