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Chapter 7. Experimental Validation - Agoraphobia
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Are the characters looking at you?
User−centered Interest−centered User or Interest Random
Figure 7.4: Graphical results to the assessment of character gaze.
what the user is looking at but the character being looked at by the user looks back at the
user. For this reason, the participant perceives a higher quantity of gaze in this mode than in
the random mode.
Regarding immersion, shown in Figure 7.5, we can see that the mean results have the
same tendency as for the second question. Immersion therefore seems to increase with character
gaze. This is in line with our expectations since we believed that immersion would
increase if the participant had the impression that the characters were aware of him/her. This
is actually the case when the characters look at the participant.
Regarding anxiety, depicted in Figure 7.6, none of the participants were particularly anxious
which is normal since we did not deal with a phobic population. However, we can
still notice a slight preference for the user-centered and the random modes. Regarding the
user-centered mode, this seems quite logical. Indeed, if we were to walk in town and have everyone
stare at us, it would be quite anxiety provoking. However, the random mode equally
scored highest in anxiety, as if it was anxiety provoking that no-one looked at us. This may
be explained in the case of participants biased towards always attentive characters, it can
seem abnormal for characters not to look at them and thus more anxiety provoking.
Regarding friendliness, we can see that when the characters were not looking at the user
at all, or only as much as other characters, they seemed less friendly than in the other modes.
This can be seen in Figure 7.7. All other modes scored approximately the same for this
feature. It is important to note that there was no facial animation in our experiment. Characters
therefore did not change expression throughout the exposure. We can thus reasonably
assume that they seemed less friendly only because they were not looking at the user.
Regarding the character awareness towards their environment, depicted in Figure 7.8,we
can see that the results to all four modes are quite similar. There is however a slight decrease
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