Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Table 7.1
Factors relevant
for achieving social presence
in terms of interactivity
Interactivity
Face-to-face interaction
Verbal communication
Quick feedback
systems are widely available nowadays but using them with emotional capabilities
has not evolved greatly since 2005 (Turk et al.
2005
). Voice is a potent social cue, it
can even evoke perceptions that a machine has multiple distinct entities (Nass and
Steuer
1993
) or even personalities (de Ruyter et al.
2005
) so it is an highly important
factor for the perception of social presence.
Interactions should also feel natural and quick. Systems should have quick feed-
back, for the user to feel immediacy of control, as delays between actions and
reactions can diminish the sense of presence (Lombard and Ditton
1997
). In robots
or on-screen characters, having a responsive real time gaze system can alone produce
a high sense of agency and increase the agent's perceived social presence (Yoshikawa
et al.
2006
).
In Table
7.1
, a summary of the interactivity factors that we consider most relevant
for improving social presence in board game artificial opponents, is presented.
Individual Differences
Different age groups can sometimes experience social pres-
ence with different intensities. Children may more easily perceive a machine as alive,
as they have less difficulty in attributing human characteristics to virtual agents or
robots (Beran and Ramirez-Serrano
2010
). Older people may be influenced by other
factors, such as the need to overcome loneliness. Heerink et al. (
2008
) assessed that
loneliness directly influences social presence and the acceptance of a companion
robot by older people.
The observer's ability to focus on the virtual environment and ignore distractions
(selective attention) also increases presence (Witmer and Singer
1998
). When users
focus more attention on a stimuli, they become more involved in their experience,
which leads to an increased sense of presence. Conversely, personal problems or
outside tasks can hinder the users' potential to feel presence. Users that are worried
with personal problems or focused on outside activities will most probably attribute
less attention to the task in hand.
When we are interacting with media applications we often feel emotionally con-
nected to an event or a character. When the connection is strong enough the character
can trigger emotional expressions from the human side. The intensity and valence of
experienced emotions such as fear or strong empathy seem likely to affect presence
(Lombard and Ditton
1997
). Moods are also reported to change how we percept
digital entities, if we are feeling sad or disturbed we may give less attention to digital
media compared to when we are in a more relaxed state.
User's personality type is also an important factor for experiencing social pres-
ence. One experiment by Lee and and Nass (
2003
) shows that when users' personality
matches a synthesized computer voice personality it positively affects user's feelings
of social presence.
