Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Human Factors
Date Submitted: Dec 2, 2021
Open Peer Review Period: Dec 2, 2021 - Jan 27, 2022
Date Accepted: Feb 21, 2022
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Acceptability of Virtual Characters as a Social Skills Trainer: Usability Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Social skills training by human trainers is a well-established method to obtain appropriate social interaction skills and strengthen social self-efficacy. Our previous works automated social skills training by developing a virtual agent that teaches social skills through interaction. This study attempts to investigate the effect of virtual agent design on automated social skills training. However previous works have not investigated virtual agent design for virtual social skills trainers.
Objective:
The three main purposes of this research are summarized: to investigate virtual agent appearance for automated SST, to investigate the relationship between acceptability and other measures (likeability, acceptability, realism, and familiarity), and to investigate the relationship between likeability and an individual’s characteristics (gender, age, and autistic traits).
Methods:
We prepared images and videos of a virtual agent, and 1,218 crowdsourced workers rated the virtual agents through a questionnaire. In designing personalized virtual agents, we investigated the acceptability, likeability, and other impressions of the virtual agents and their relationship to the individuals’ characteristics.
Results:
As a result, we found the difference between the virtual agents in all measures (P < 0.001). A female anime-type virtual agent was rated as the most likeable. We also confirmed that participants’ gender, age, and autistic traits are related to the ratings.
Conclusions:
We confirmed the effect of virtual agent design on automated social skills training. Our findings are important in designing the appearance of an agent for use in personalized automated social skills training.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.