Decision Model for a Virtual Agent that can Touch and be Touched
Résumé
Touch is an essential sense to the social development and well-being of individuals, acting as a communicative channel for emotions and empathy. Our overall objective is to enhance the ability of embodied conversational agents (ECAs) to bond with humans. To reach such an objective, we have endowed an ECA with the capacity to touch and be touched in a social interaction with a human in an immersive environment. By drawing inspiration from literature on human-human social touch and related works on human-agent tactile interactions, we have developed a framework for a touching ECA able to perceive when and how a user touches it and decide when and how to respond accordingly. This paper focuses on going beyond a simple bi-directional touch interaction through a decision model that actually adapts its behaviour to the content of the interaction, the level of rapport and the human's touch avoidance sensibility. This enables an actual interactive loop between the agent and the human.
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