Social Touch in Human-agent Interactions in an Immersive Virtual Environment

Fabien Boucaud, Quentin Tafiani, Catherine Pelachaud, Indira Thouvenin

2019

Abstract

Works on artificial social agents, and especially embodied conversational agents, have endowed them with social-emotional capabilities. They are being given the abilities to take into account more and more modalities to express their thoughts, such as speech, gestures, facial expressions, etc. However, the sense of touch, although particularly interesting for social and emotional communication, is still a modality widely missing from interactions between humans and agents. We believe that integrating touch into those modalities of interaction between humans and agents would help enhancing their channels of empathic communication. In order to verify this idea, we present in this paper a system allowing tactile communication through haptic feedback on the hand and the arm of a human user. We then present a preliminary evaluation of the credibility of social touch in human-agent interaction in an immersive environment. The first results are promising and bring new leads to improve the way humans can interact through touch with virtual social agents.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Boucaud F., Tafiani Q., Pelachaud C. and Thouvenin I. (2019). Social Touch in Human-agent Interactions in an Immersive Virtual Environment. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (VISIGRAPP 2019) - Volume 2: HUCAPP; ISBN 978-989-758-354-4, SciTePress, pages 129-136. DOI: 10.5220/0007397001290136

in Bibtex Style

@conference{hucapp19,
author={Fabien Boucaud and Quentin Tafiani and Catherine Pelachaud and Indira Thouvenin},
title={Social Touch in Human-agent Interactions in an Immersive Virtual Environment},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (VISIGRAPP 2019) - Volume 2: HUCAPP},
year={2019},
pages={129-136},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0007397001290136},
isbn={978-989-758-354-4},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (VISIGRAPP 2019) - Volume 2: HUCAPP
TI - Social Touch in Human-agent Interactions in an Immersive Virtual Environment
SN - 978-989-758-354-4
AU - Boucaud F.
AU - Tafiani Q.
AU - Pelachaud C.
AU - Thouvenin I.
PY - 2019
SP - 129
EP - 136
DO - 10.5220/0007397001290136
PB - SciTePress