Texte intégral / Full text (pdf, 20 MiB) - Infoscience - EPFL

Chapter 7. Experimental Validation - Agoraphobia
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
0
Do the characters seem friendly?
User−centered Interest−centered User or Interest Random
Figure 7.7: Graphical results to the assessment of character friendliness.
in awareness perception in the random mode and a slight increase in the user or interest
mode. This parameter however did not change throughout the different modes. It seems as
though when characters look at each other and at the user randomly, users perceive that they
are less aware of their environment. This may be explained by the fact that the characters
seem not to be looking at the participant at all. This could equally be explained by the fact
that there is no logic as to where or what the characters look at in this mode; the interest
points are arbitrarily selected.
Concerning the evaluation of character awareness towards other characters, the results
were not what we expected. We expected the random mode to have the highest results.
However, we can see in Figure 7.9 that the two which obtained the highest results were the
interest-centered and the user or interest modes. It is normal for the user-centered to obtain
the lowest score since the characters would only be looking at the user but not at the other
characters. Those which scored highest though, were the modes in which character attention
was divided between the user and other characters. Once again, the fact that there is no logic
as to what the characters look at in the random mode seems to give the impression that they
are not aware of one another.
Finally, concerning character awareness towards the user, the user-centered mode scored
slightly above the user or interest one, as depicted in Figure 7.10. We expected the usercentered
mode to be clearly scored highest. The tendency however is the same as for the
second question, which is in line with what we expected since both questions were alike.
We have equally performed a Student’s T-test in order to verify whether there were any
statistical significances between the various modes. The results are shown in Table 7.2. If
we consider the 95% probability of significant difference between modes, we can see that
the assessment of gaze (are the characters looking at you?) falls into this category for all
112