Domestic animals have a long history of enriching human lives physically and mentally by filling a variety of different roles, such as service animals, emotional support animals, companions, and pets. Despite this, technological realizations of such animals in augmented reality (AR) are largely underexplored in terms of their behavior and interactions as well as effects they might have on human users' perception or behavior. In this paper, we describe a simulated virtual companion animal, in the form of a dog, in a shared AR space. We investigated its effects on participants' perception and behavior, including locomotion related to proxemics, with respect to their AR dog and other real people in the environment. We conducted a 2 by 2 mixed factorial human-subject study, in which we varied (i) the AR dog's awareness and behavior with respect to other people in the physical environment and (ii) the awareness and behavior of those people with respect to the AR dog. Our results show that having an AR companion dog changes participants' locomotion behavior, proxemics, and social interaction with other people who can or can not see the AR dog. We also show that the AR dog's simulated awareness and behaviors have an impact on participants' perception, including co-presence, animalism, perceived physicality, and dog's perceived awareness of the participant and environment. We discuss our findings and present insights and implications for the realization of effective AR animal companions.

In this article, we investigate the effects of the physical influence of a virtual human (VH) in the context of face-to-face interaction in a mixed reality environment. In Experiment 1, participants played a tabletop game with a VH, in which each player takes a turn and moves their own token along the designated spots on the shared table. We compared two conditions as follows: the VH in the virtual condition moves a virtual token that can only be seen through augmented reality (AR) glasses, while the VH in the physical condition moves a physical token as the participants do; therefore the VH’s token can be seen even in the periphery of the AR glasses. For the physical condition, we designed an actuator system underneath the table. The actuator moves a magnet under the table which then moves the VH’s physical token over the surface of the table. Our results indicate that participants felt higher co-presence with the VH in the physical condition, and participants assessed the VH as a more physical entity compared to the VH in the virtual condition. We further observed transference effects when participants attributed the VH’s ability to move physical objects to other elements in the real world. Also, the VH’s physical influence improved participants’ overall experience with the VH. In Experiment 2, we further looked into the question how the physical-virtual latency in movements affected the perceived plausibility of the VH’s interaction with the real world. Our results indicate that a slight temporal difference between the physical token reacting to the virtual hand’s movement increased the perceived realism and causality of the mixed reality interaction. We discuss potential explanations for the findings and implications for future shared mixed reality tabletop setups.

Virtual humans (VHs) in augmented reality (AR) can provide users an illusory sense of being together in the real space. However, such an illusion can easily break when the augmented VH conflicts (or is overlaid) with the real objects. Recent spatial understanding technology is starting to make physically plausible VHs in response to collisions, but there are still limitations (e.g., resolution, accuracy) and inevitable conflict situations (e.g., unexpected passer-by), especially in daily life. Moreover, depending on the situation, VH’s plausible behavior to avoid collision may rather interfere with the original interaction with the users. In this paper, we investigate three such situations: (1) when VH appears in a room through a closed door, (2) when the VH’s body overlaps with static real objects, and (3) when a real moving object passes through the VH. While we considered (2) as an avoidable situation where physically plausible behaviors of VHs might be required, (1) and (3) were considered as inevitable situations (e.g., VH appearing out of nowhere, or passer-by cannot be aware of a virtual being), and we may not present VH’s plausible behaviors, so alternatives might be required. Thus, for each of these notable situations in AR, we tested different visual effects as presentation methods for physical conflicts between a VH and real objects. Our findings indicate that visual effects improve VH’s social/co-presence and physicality depending on the situations and effect types as well as influence users’ attention/social behaviors. We discuss the implications of our findings and future research directions.

The demand for a conversational system with digital humans has increased with the development of artificial intelligence. Latency can occur in such conversational systems because of natural language processing and network issues, which can deteriorate the user’s performance and the availability of the systems. There have been attempts to mitigate user-perceived latency by using conversational fillers in human–agent interaction and human–robot interaction. However, non-verbal cues, such as gestures, have received less attention in such attempts, despite their essential roles in communication. Therefore, we designed gestural fillers for the digital humans. This study examined the effects of whether the conversation type and gesture filler matched or not. We also compared the effects of the gestural fillers with conversational fillers. The results showed that the gestural fillers mitigate user-perceived latency and affect the willingness, impression, competence, and discomfort in conversations with digital humans.