Comparing Virtual Humans to Real Humans

     The purpose of this project is to investigate

whether people respond to a virtual human in

the same way they would to a real human. We

looked to social psychology literature to find

tasks that we could compare results of human-

human interaction with that of human-virtual

human interaction.

         We have focused on experimentally determining if there is a similarity between how people respond to virtual humans and how they respond to real people. We started by looking at how personality effects the amount of time people are willing to spend with a virtual human Next, we looked at social psychology literature and began replicating classical tests of human-human interaction, replacing the human role with a virtual human. This allows us to directly compare how people respond to a virtual human and how they respond to a real person. One such study compared humans to virtual-humans based on social facilitation and inhibition. Conditions included were a female virtual human projected on the wall, a female virtual human in an immersive environment, and a female real human observer. Our data shows that participants responded to the Virtual Human similarly to the way they responded to the female human observer. Social inhibition effect was only most present with female participants, and the proportion of women who learned the novel task varied by audience type.

Papers:(click for pdf)

Zanbaka, C., Ulinski, A., Goolkasian, P., Hodges, L. F. (2004). "Effects of Virtual Human Presence on Task Performance," Proceeding of the International Conference on Artificial Reality and Telexistence (ICAT), pp.174-181.