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6.4. Eye-tracking for Interaction
Did the character on screen seem interested or indifferent? (1: very interested, 2: fairly
interested, 3: neither interested nor indifferent, 4: fairly indifferent, 5: very indifferent)
Did the character on screen seem engaged or distracted during the conversation? (1:
very engaged, 2: fairly engaged, 3: neither engaged nor distracted, 4: fairly distracted,
5: very distracted)
Did the character seem friendly or not? (1: very friendly, 2: fairly friendly, 3: neither
friendly nor unfriendly, 4: fairly unfriendly, 5: very unfriendly)
Did the character seem to behave in a normal way with regards to what you were
telling him/her? (1: very normal, 2: fairly normal, 3: neither normal nor abnormal, 4:
fairly abnormal, 5: very abnormal)
The first two questions were asked in order to verify the distinction between attentive
and bored behaviors. The third question does not indicate much, it was only asked in order
to divert attention from the questions specific to our experiment. The fourth question was
asked in order to verify our first hypothesis; that a character which changes behavior is more
realistic than one who does not. It was equally asked in order to verify our second hypothesis;
that a character changing behavior randomly is less realistic than one who changes with
regards to what the subject is looking at. A fifth question was asked in order to obtain
feedback from the subjects on any point which would not have been addressed by their
answers to the previous questions:
On the whole, how would you describe the differences in the characters’ behaviors, if
any, in the four scenes?
6.4.2 Experimental Protocol - Case Study
In addition to the validation conducted on these 12 healthy subjects, we have tested our
application on a young 14 year-old girl suffering from Asperger syndrome. As explained
in the Glossary (see Appendix D), the Asperger syndrome is an Autism Spectrum Disorder
(ASD). One of the diagnostic criteria of the Asperger syndrome is a marked impairment in
social interaction [American Psychiatric Association, 1994].
As a first point, it is important to note that the experiment did not aim at any therapeutic
benefit for the subject. It was aimed to test our architecture with someone having problems
with social situations. This young girl accepted to test our setup and give us her feedback.
She was accompanied by her therapist and her mother for the experiment. Her mother, however,
did not stay in the same room as the experiment went on. We did not tell her what
we were looking for. She was thus naive towards our objectives. As a first step, we seated
her in front of the large back-projection screen on which we displayed the scene depicted in
Figure 6.11. We asked her to wear the coupled eye- and head-tracker and recorded her eye
movements throughout the experiment. We then asked her to do a public speaking exercise,
and talk to the virtual character for a couple of minutes. The complete session lasted for approximately
10 minutes. We first made sure that the character would be attentive even if not
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