During my final semester at KTH I spent my time working on my master thesis: Perception of Trustworthiness and Valence of Emotional Expressions in Virtual Characters
I investigated social avatars from a human perception point-of-view when it comes to how trustworthy we find them. I spent quite some time on this and was very proud after my final presentation to be graded with an A.
Abstract:
Knowledge on how to design trustworthy virtual characters are of importance when these are becoming more and more common interaction partners. In this study, a closer look at the suggested relationship from previous research between valence and trustworthiness is investigated by constructing virtual characters with different non-verbal behaviours and letting participants rate them in a pre-study. A second question of how perception of trustworthiness is based for virtual characters is investigated by letting participants play a trust game with life-sized virtual characters on a big 4k-screen. Results indicated that valence is not necessarily a factor influencing trustworthiness and that positive valence together with mutual gaze is not enough to provide a clearly trustworthy virtual character. Results also indicated that perception of trustworthiness is not based solely on a virtual character’s previous decisions of trust in a longer interaction but also on its non-verbal behaviour. The outcome of this study will help when constructing virtual characters in different scenarios, especially when the goal is to make them as trustworthy as possible. The study also gives insight into tools and software that can be used when creating virtual characters and setting up scenarios of trust.
Tools used: Unity, C#, LaTeX, Excel
