Kangsoo Kim

The wobbly table: Increased social presence via subtle incidental movement of a real-virtual table

While performing everyday interactions, we often incidentally touch and move objects in subtle ways. These objects are not necessarily directly related to the task at hand, and the movement of an object might even be entirely unintentional. If another person is touching the object at the same time, the movement can transfer through the object and be experienced - however subtly - by the other person. For example, when one person hands a drink to another, at some point both individuals will be touching the glass, and consequently exerting small (often unnoticed) forces on the other person. Despite the frequency of such subtle incidental movements of shared objects in everyday interactions, few have examined how these movements affect human-virtual human (VH) interaction. We ran an experiment to assess how presence and social presence are affected when a person experiences subtle, incidental movement through a shared real-virtual object. We constructed a real-virtual room with a table that spanned the boundary between the real and virtual environments. The participant was seated on the real side of the table, which visually extended into the virtual world via a projection screen, and the VH was seated on the virtual side of the table. The two interacted by playing a game of “Twenty Questions,” where one player asked the other a series of 20 yes/no questions to deduce what object the other player was thinking about. During the game, the “wobbly” group of subjects experienced subtle incidental movements of the real-virtual table: the entire real-virtual table tilted slightly away/toward the subject when the virtual/real human leaned on it. The control group also played the same game, except the table did not wobble. Results indicate that the wobbly group had higher presence and social presence with the virtual human in general, with statistically significant increases in presence, co-presence, and attentional allocation. We present the experiment and results, and discuss some potential implications for virtual human systems and some potential future studies.

Empa talk: a physiological data incorporated human-computer interactions

We present a novel approach that allows the user to feel the others emotional status while communicating with each other in a video chat. The video chat is composed of physiological sensors and multimodal displays. In our first prototype, we employed a Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) sensor and a Blood Volume Pulse (BVP) sensor as they were crucial indications to human emotions. A vibrotactile motor and a RGB LED were also used in order to convey and display the others emotion on ones wrist. Along with the hardware part, we implemented intuitive software for processing, transmitting, and displaying bio feedback data.

Maintaining and Enhancing Human-Surrogate Presence in Augmented Reality

We present some background and ideas related to a humans sense of presence with a human surrogate (a stand-in for a human) in an augmented reality (AR) setting. In particular we examine several factors related to human surrogates that are common to robotics, virtual reality, and augmented reality; and some challenges that are unique to AR. We then discuss the roles of surrogate characteristics and behaviors in maintaining and perhaps enhancing a sense of presence with a surrogate. We conclude by sharing some ideas for intentionally employing particular surrogate characteristics/behaviors that could simultaneously address the AR-specific challenges while maintaining and perhaps even enhancing the sense of co-presence/social presence with human surrogates in AR.

The effects of virtual human's spatial and behavioral coherence with physical objects on social presence in AR

In augmented reality, people can feel the illusion of virtual humans (VHs) integrated into a real (physical) space. However, affordances of the real world and virtual contents might conflict, for example, when the VHs and real objects “collide” by occupying the same space. This implausible conflict can cause a break in presence in real–virtual human interactions. In this paper, we address an effort to avoid this conflict by maintaining the VHs spatial and behavioral coherence with respect to the physical objects or events (e.g., natural occlusions and appropriate help‐requesting behaviors to avoid implausible physical–virtual collisions). We present a human subject experiment examining the effects of the physical–virtual coherence on human perceptions, such as social/copresence and behaviors with the VH. The basic ideas, experimental design, and results supporting the benefit of the VHs spatial and behavioral coherence are presented and discussed.

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 humans 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.

The impact of avatar-owner visual similarity on body ownership in immersive virtual reality

In this paper we report on an investigation of the effects of a self-avatars visual similarity to a users actual appearance, on their perceptions of the avatar in an immersive virtual reality (IVR) experience. We conducted a user study to examine the participants sense of body ownership, presence and visual realism under three levels of avatar-owner visual similarity: (L1) an avatar reconstructed from real imagery of the participants appearance, (L2) a cartoon-like virtual avatar created by a 3D artist for each participant, where the avatar shoes and clothing mimic that of the participant, but using a low-fidelity model, and (L3) a cartoon-like virtual avatar with a pre-defined appearance for the shoes and clothing. Surprisingly, the results indicate that the participants generally exhibited the highest sense of body ownership and presence when inhabiting the cartoon-like virtual avatar mimicking the outft of the participant (L2), despite the relatively low participant similarity. We present our experiment and main findings, also, discuss the potential impact of a self-avatars visual differences on human perceptions in IVR.

Can social presence be contagious? Effects of social presence priming on interaction with Virtual Humans

This paper explores whether witnessing a Virtual Human (VH) in what appears to be a socially engaging discussion with another virtual human confederate/accomplice (VHC) can prime a person to feel and behave more socially engaged with the VH in a subsequent interaction. To explore this social priming phenomenon, we conducted an experiment in which participants in a control group had no priming while those in an experimental group were briefly exposed to an engaging social interaction between a VH and a nearby VHC. The participants primed by exposure to the brief VHC-VH interaction reported being significantly more excited and alert, perceiving the VH closer, and showed significantly higher measures of Co-Presence, Attentional Allocation, and Message Understanding dimensions of social presence towards the VH, compared to those who were not primed.

Exploring social presence transfer in real-virtual human interaction

We explore whether a peripheral observation of apparent mutual social presence between a real human (RH) and a virtual human (VH) can in turn increase a subjects sense of social presence with the VH. In other words, we explore whether social presence can “transfer” from one RH-VH interaction to another. Specifically, we carried out an experiment where human subjects were asked to play a game with a VH. As they entered the game room, approximately half of the subjects were exposed to a brief but apparently engaging conversation between an RH and the VH. The subjects who were exposed to the brief RH-VH interaction had significantly higher measures of both emotional connection and the attentional allocation dimension of social presence for the VH, compared to those who were not. We describe the motivation, the experiment, and the results.

Improving Social Presence with a Virtual Human via Multimodal Physical -- Virtual Interactivity in AR

In a social context where a real human interacts with a virtual human (VH) in the same space, ones sense of social/co-presence with the VH is an important factor for the quality of interaction and the VHs social influence to the human user in context. Although augmented reality (AR) enables the superposition of VHs in the real world, the resulting sense of social/co-presence is usually far lower than with a real human. In this paper, we introduce a research approach employing multimodal interactivity between the virtual environment and the physical world, where a VH and a human user are co-located, to improve the social/co-presence with the VH. A preliminary study suggests a promising effect on the sense of copresence with a VH when a subtle airflow from a real fan can blow a virtual paper and curtains next to the VH as a physical--virtual interactivity. Our approach can be generalized to support social/co-presence with any virtual contents in AR beyond the particular VH scenarios.

Exploring the effects of observed physicality conflicts on real-virtual human interaction in augmented reality

Augmented reality (AR) enables the illusion of computer-generated virtual objects and humans co-existing with us in the real world. Virtual humans (VHs) in AR can further induce an illusion of physicality in the real world due to their form of presentation and their behavior, such as showing awareness of their surroundings. However, certain behaviors can cause a conflict that breaks this illusion, for example, when we see a VH passing through a physical object. In this paper we describe a human-subject study that we performed to test the hypothesis that participants experience higher copresence in conflict-free circumstances, and we investigate the magnitude of this effect and behavioral manifestations. Participants perceived a social situation in a room that they shared with a VH as seen through a HoloLens head-mounted display. The behavior of the VH either caused conflicts with (occupied the same space as) physical entities, or avoided them. Our results show that the conflicts in physicality significantly reduced subjective reports of copresence. Moreover, we observed that participants were more likely to cause a conflict (occupy the same space as) virtual entities in case the VH had avoided the conflict. We discuss implications for future research and shared AR setups with real-virtual human interactions.