Sunday, 8 June 2008

Research result: Artificial Character Interface v.s. Users' emotion and interaction

I found many useful articles or reports related to Artificial Charaters.

The above links and articles are mostly say the Artifical Characters has posstive influence to users. I tried to search some negative opinions (for ex. why people hate or dislike AC, or how AC bothering users...), but only got one...

  • Affective affordances: Improving interface character engagement through interaction
    http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1161668.1161675&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&CFID=8307135&CFTOKEN=85347751

    ABSTRACT
    The nature of humans interacting with interface characters (e.g. embodied agents) is not well understood. The I-PEFiC model provides an integrative perspective on human-character interaction, assuming that the processes of engagement and user interaction exchange information in explaining user responses with interface characters. An experiment using the Sims2 game was conducted to test the effects of aesthetics (beautiful versus ugly, as engagement factor) and affordances (help versus obstacle, as interaction factor) of interface characters on use intentions, user engagement, and user satisfaction. Results of the experiment showed that
    (1) people tended to use helpful characters more than obstructing characters,
    (2) user engagement was enhanced by beauty and perceived affordance of the character whereas
    (3) intentions to use the character were not affected by good looks, and
    (4) the most satisfied users were those that were engaged with the character as well as willing to use it. This stresses the importance of enhancing affordances so to increase user engagement with interface characters. The I-PEFiC model provided a valuable framework to study the (interdependent) effects of relevant factors in human-character interaction. (this article is not free on-line, after I registered, I found it costs high, so i just keep the abstract for our reference first)

The above are all my findings. Besides, during the research, I found related terms, such as "User-Friendly Character", which are the characters that feature on the webcomic User Friendly. Although it's for web design, i will try to search for more about interface character.

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