Papers about Looks

Rapid increases in agent technology as well as the movement of computing into more and more social transactions has increased the need for embodied interface agents. However, interaction designers currently lack sufficient guidelines to confidently and successfully design the visual form of these agents. In this paper we offer a summary of research on the visual form of agents. In addition, we present our own study that explores the relationships between an agents visual form, the... Read more

The notion of trust has been virtually absent from most work on how people assess and choose their information sources. Based on two empirical cases this study shows that software engineers and users of e-commerce websites devote a lot of attention to considerations about the trustworthiness of their sources, which include people, documents, and virtual agents. In the project-based software engineering environment trust tends to be a collaborative issue and the studied software engineers normally... Read more

The notion of trust has been virtually absent from most work on how people assess and choose their information sources. Based on two empirical cases this study shows that software engineers and users of e-commerce websites devote a lot of attention to considerations about the trustworthiness of their sources, which include people, documents, and virtual agents. In the project-based software engineering environment trust tends to be a collaborative issue and the studied software engineers normally... Read more

Embodied conversational agents (ECAs) are synthetic characters which can converse with the user (or with other ECAs) by some natural modalities of human-human communication. ECAs have become increasingly popular, as the promising new interface for several traditional computer applications or as the basis for applications in entirely new domains. Much research has been going on to endow ECAs with own behavioral, personality and emotional models, to enable ECAs to act more or less... Read more

This research investigates design guidelines to assist in choosing the appropriate conversational agents to act as assistants in interactive e-commerce applications. The first experiment evaluated the effectiveness and user acceptability of human-like agents in an electronic retail application. The second evaluated the same cast of agents in another application to explore application dependency effects on the users’ attitudes toward the cast of agents. The third experiment evaluated a cast of cartoon-like humanoid agents in an... Read more

This paper presents the results of an empirical evaluation of the effectiveness and user acceptability of a selection of animated agents in a multi-modal electronic retail application. Male and female versions of six animated agent technologies were repeatedly evaluated in the role of an interactive conversational sales assistant. The experiment involved participants eavesdropping on spoken dialogues between a ’customer’and each of the animated assistants. Participants then completed usability questionnaires and took part in a debriefing interview designed... Read more

In this paper King and Ohya explored people’s reactions to human and nonhuman visual forms of embodied agents. They asked participants to rate 20 different visual forms of agents ranging from simple geometric shapes to wire frames of humans to detailed 2D and 3D human forms. Read more

It is still an open question whether software agents should be personified in the interface. In order to study the effects of faces and facial expressions in the interface, a series of experiments was conducted to compare subjects’ responses to and evaluation of different faces and facial expressions. The experimental results obtained demonstrate that: 1) personified interfaces help users engage in a task, and are well suited for an entertainment domain; 2) people’s impressions of a face... Read more