Exploring behaviour towards avatars and agents in immersive virtual environments with mixed-agency interactions

Immersive virtual environments (IVEs) in which multiple users navigate by walking and interact with each other in natural ways are perfectly suited for team applications from training to recreation. At the same time, they can solve scheduling conflicts by employing virtual agents in place of missing team members or additional participants of a scenario. While this idea has been long discussed in IVEs research there are no prior publications on social interactions in systems with multiple embodied users and agents. This paper presents an experiment at a work-in-progress stage that addresses the impact of perceived agency and control of a virtual character in a collaborative scenario with two embodied users and one virtual agent. Our future study will investigate whether users treat avatars and agents differently within a mixed-agency scenario, analysing several behavioural metrics and self-report of participants.

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