Authors:
Fabien Boucaud
1
;
Quentin Tafiani
1
;
Catherine Pelachaud
1
and
Indira Thouvenin
2
Affiliations:
1
Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique, CNRS UMR 7222, Sorbonne Universités, UPMC Campus Jussieu, 75005 Paris and France
;
2
Laboratoire Heudiasyc, CNRS UMR 7253, Sorbonne Universités, Université de Technologie de Compiègne, 60200 Compiègne and France
Keyword(s):
Virtual Reality, Immersive Environment, Human-agent Interaction, Immersive Room, Embodied Conversational Agents, Social Touch, Empathic Communication.
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 w
ay humans can interact through touch with virtual social agents.
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