Improving social presence in human-agent interaction

Abstract

Humans have a tendency to consider media devices as social beings. Social agents and artificial opponents can be examined as one instance of this effect. With today's technology it is already possible to create artificial agents that are perceived as socially present. In this paper, we start by identifying the factors that influence perceptions of social presence in human-agent interactions. By taking these factors into account and by following previously defined guidelines for building socially present artificial opponents, a case study was created in which a social robot plays the Risk board game against three human players. An experiment was performed to ascertain whether the agent created in this case study is perceived as socially present. The experiment suggested that by following the guidelines for creating socially present artificial board game opponents, the perceived social presence of users towards the artificial agent improves.