Emotional virtual crowd on task completion in virtual markets

Abstract

This paper studies the effects of a virtual crowd with emotion on task completion in a virtual market. The users have to interact with the virtual agents so that the virtual agents are willing to lead the users to specific vendors. Then, the users can buy the required items. The users communicate with the virtual agents via a conversation dialog. The emotional agents' moods are affected by their own interaction (e.g., collision) while they are walking. Furthermore, their moods are also affected by the conversational responses of the users. We adopt a simple 2D mood model and use icons to represent the mood states of the agents. The mood model supports four mood states, which are Excitement, Anger, Sadness, and Neutral. We conducted a user study to evaluate the effects of the emotional virtual agents in different aspects, including task completion, time spent in conversation, following distance, and realism of the emotional virtual crowd.