Embodied Conversational Agents with Situation Awareness for Training in Virtual Reality
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Date
2023
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Eurographics Association
Abstract
Embodied conversational agents have a great potential in virtual reality training applications. This paper investigates the impact of conversational agents on users in a first responder training scenario. We integrated methods for automatic speech recognition and speech synthesis with natural language processing into a VR training application in the Unity game engine. Additionally, we present a method for enabling situation awareness for agents in a virtual environment. Finally, we conducted a between-subject lab experiment with 24 participants which investigated differences between conversational agents and agents with pre-scripted audio. Several metrics were measured in the experiment including presence, subjective task performance, learning outcome, interaction quality, quality of information presentation, perceived realism, co-presence, and training task duration. Our results suggest that users trying our conversational agents condition experienced significantly higher level of copresence than users with pre-scripted audio. Additionally, significant differences in subjective task performance and training duration were discovered between genders. Based on the results of our qualitative analysis, we provide guidelines that can facilitate future design of VR training applications and research studies with embodied conversational agents.
Description
CCS Concepts: Computing methodologies → Virtual reality; Human-centered computing → User studies
@inproceedings{10.2312:egve.20231310,
booktitle = {ICAT-EGVE 2023 - International Conference on Artificial Reality and Telexistence and Eurographics Symposium on Virtual Environments},
editor = {Jean-Marie Normand and Maki Sugimoto and Veronica Sundstedt},
title = {{Embodied Conversational Agents with Situation Awareness for Training in Virtual Reality}},
author = {Kán, Peter and Rumpelnik, Martin and Kaufmann, Hannes},
year = {2023},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association},
ISSN = {1727-530X},
ISBN = {978-3-03868-218-9},
DOI = {10.2312/egve.20231310}
}