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The user in the group: evaluating the effects of autonomous group dynamics

Published: 13 June 2007 Publication History

Abstract

Autonomous characters in virtual environmentshave the potential to improve the interaction experience of users, specially, their social experience.This effect is driven by the interactions occurring between users and the autonomous characters, that in certain scenarios can be in the context of a group.However, for these group interactions to be successful, it is not enough to assure that the autonomous charactersbehave in a coherent manner from an individual perspective,but it is also necessary that they exhibit behavioursthat are coherent with the group composition, context andstructure. Therefore, we have developed a model to support believable group dynamics of autonomous characters, inspired in theories developed in human social psychological sciences. This model defines the knowledge that eachindividual should build about the others and about the group it belongs, and how this knowledge drives their interactions in the group. The model was integrated in the mind of the autonomous characters that perform a collaborative task, in a computer game, with a human player. The game was used in a study that showed that players' interaction experience was better when interaction with groups that followed our model, namely, regarding trust and social identification with the group. In addition, we found some evidence that players prefer playing in groups that have higher level of conflict.

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Cited By

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  • (2008)Swarm intelligence for self-reconfiguring walking robot2008 IEEE Swarm Intelligence Symposium10.1109/SIS.2008.4668286(1-8)Online publication date: Sep-2008
  • (2008)Exploring the desirable correspondence between robot appearance and interaction typesRO-MAN 2008 - The 17th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication10.1109/ROMAN.2008.4600676(261-266)Online publication date: Aug-2008

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cover image ACM Conferences
ACE '07: Proceedings of the international conference on Advances in computer entertainment technology
June 2007
324 pages
ISBN:9781595936400
DOI:10.1145/1255047
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 13 June 2007

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  1. autonomous characters
  2. group dynamics
  3. human-computer interaction
  4. user studies

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View all
  • (2008)Swarm intelligence for self-reconfiguring walking robot2008 IEEE Swarm Intelligence Symposium10.1109/SIS.2008.4668286(1-8)Online publication date: Sep-2008
  • (2008)Exploring the desirable correspondence between robot appearance and interaction typesRO-MAN 2008 - The 17th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication10.1109/ROMAN.2008.4600676(261-266)Online publication date: Aug-2008

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