Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Table 7.3
Factors relevant
for achieving social presence
in terms of realism
Realism
Theory of mind
Consistency
Autonomy
Embodiment
Social and emotional behavior
saying “hello”, and by waving at them. These virtual characters had limited social
behaviour. However, mutual gaze combined with lucky randomness was perceived
by participant's as the characters were watching and imitating them.
Embodiment
is also important for designing a computer that aims at achieving a
higher sense of social presence. In Jung and Lee (
2004
), participants felt a signifi-
cantly stronger sense of social presence when they were interacting with a physically
embodied Aibo robot than with a physically disembodied Aibo displayed on an LCD
screen.
Research indicates that humans and computers can work together more effectively
(Schermerhorn et al.
2008
) if human-like cues extracted from usual social behaviour
are employed. We use our emotions in our social world almost constantly. We use
them for communication, signalling and for social co-ordination. This kind of natural
social primitives can be interpreted by humans without the need to learn something
new. As so, a human-like computer can cause social facilitation in users and endowing
agents with emotional behaviour can contribute to the realism of a character and thus
to the perceived social presence.
7.2.2
Social Relationships with Intelligent Agents
Humans can build social relationships with a large variety of entities. In some cases,
interaction with pets complements or even substitutes interpersonal relationships
(Veevers
1985
). The same phenomenon is beginning to happen with digital entities.
Social relationships can now be established with new forms of artificially intelligent
beings, such as a simple desktop or laptop (Reeves
1996
), virtual agents (Cassell
2000
) and robots (Brooks et al.
2004
; Breazeal
2002
; Jung and Lee
2004
). In this
subsection we will look at some research examples where embodied agents, being it
screen characters or social robots, are designed with some kind of social behaviour.
The term “socially interactive robots” has been used by Fong et al. (
2003
)tode-
scribe robots for which social interaction plays a key role. These robots are important
in application domains where social skills are required. These domains include those
where the ability to cooperate with humans by helping them to fulfil a task (Cao et al.
1997
) is important, or domains where the primary function of the robot is to socially
interact with people such as companion robots (Dautenhahn et al.
2005
) or robots
for learning or education (Argall et al.
2009
).
