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7.4. Results
1-2 1-3 1-4 2-3 2-4 3-4
Normality 0.6888 0.579 0.3217 0.8711 0.5527 0.6746
Gaze 0.0001 0.1277 0.0000 0.0126 0.0005 0.0000
Immersion 0.1504 0.5041 0.8614 0.4804 0.7641 0.3252
Anxiety 0.2783 0.6418 0.9561 0.5475 0.3360 0.7010
Friendliness 0.7421 0.8741 0.0122 0.8867 0.0551 0.0456
Environment 0.8470 0.6540 0.6651 0.7965 0.5343 0.3868
Characters 0.1073 0.1222 0.4345 0.9548 0.4963 0.4890
User 0.0179 0.2510 0.0000 0.2185 0.0012 0.0000
Table 7.2: Results to Student’s T-test. 1 is the user-centered mode, 2 is the interest-centered
mode, 3 is the user or interest centered mode and 4 is the random mode.
However, it has to be noted that all participants did not react in the same way towards the
experiment. Some participants focused on other things than expected, such as character size
and the fact that there was no collision detection between them and the user. On the other
hand, other participants set these factors aside and focused on character gaze attention behaviors.
For example, the correlation between perceived immersion and perceived awareness
of characters towards the user increases to 66% if we take out those who complained of lack
of collision avoidance. We thus believe that this factor can greatly account for low scores in
normality, awareness and immersion. This value was above 75% for 10 of the participants
and above 90% for 6 of them.
Regarding the most normal, preferred mode, 14 participants out of the 30 opted for the
user or interest one. This is almost half of the population we have tested. Out of the 16
remaining, 11 chose the user-centered one. A little more than a third of our tested cohort
were therefore possibly biased towards an always attentive population of virtual characters.
Finally, 4 participants chose the interest-centered mode and 1 chose the random one. When
asked why, almost all the participants having chosen the user or interest mode, answered that
it seemed more natural to them because the characters were looking at them but not staring
at them. The characters seemed to be interested in them and aware of them but also of other
characters in the scene. There are thus really two major trends. On one hand, we found a
group of people for whom it seemed more natural of being constantly looked at by the virtual
characters. On the other hand, almost half the tested cohort had a preference for the random
mode in which they were being looked at but not all the time and not by all characters.
It is interesting to note that the correlations are different if we isolate the preferred mode.
For example, the correlation between anxiety and the perceived gaze of characters was 58%
for those who preferred the user-centered mode. On the other hand, it was 29% when considering
those who opted for the user or interest mode. It is quite interesting to note that
for those users who found always attentive characters as most natural, the correlation with
anxiety was almost twice as high as for those who preferred characters who looked at them
but not always. The same tendency was found between perceived normality and awareness
of characters towards the participants, and also between perceived friendliness and perceived
awareness towards the user. The correlations in all these cases are practically twice as high
in the participants who preferred the user-centered mode.
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