Browsing by Author "Mousas, Christos"

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    Developing a Scale for Measuring the Believability of Virtual Agents
    (The Eurographics Association, 2023) Guo, Siqi; Adamo, Nicoletta; Mousas, Christos; Jean-Marie Normand; Maki Sugimoto; Veronica Sundstedt
    Creating believable virtual agents has long been the focus of artists and scientists. A believable agent enables the audience to be emotionally involved in a narrative, willingly suspending their disbelief for the pleasure of appreciating literacy, drama, film, etc. In the past few decades, believability has become the goal of virtual reality developers and researchers. In the realm of virtual reality, it is commonly accepted that a believable virtual agent should have personality, emotion, agency, intelligence, and more. Despite its seemingly complicated requirements, believability is a fragile product that can be easily jeopardized by missing one or more of these elements. In this paper, we review the questionnaires that past researchers have used on the topic of virtual agents' believability. Based on the prevailing questions identified in the relevant studies, we propose a scale-aiming at standardizing one-for measuring the believability of virtual agents. We recommend that future research involving virtual agents refer to this scale to evaluate the level of their believability.
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    Exploring EEG-Annotated Affective Animations in Virtual Reality: Suggestions for Improvement
    (The Eurographics Association, 2022) Krogmeier, Claudia; Mousas, Christos; Hideaki Uchiyama; Jean-Marie Normand
    In this work, we recorded brain activity data from participants who viewed 12 affective character animations in virtual reality. Frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA) scores were calculated from electroencephalography (EEG) data to understand objective affective responses to these animations. A subset of these animations were then annotated as either low FAA (meaning they elicited lower FAA responses), or high FAA (meaning they elicited higher FAA responses). Next, these annotated animations were used in a primary 2×2 study in which we a) examined if we could replicate FAA responses to low FAA and high FAA animations in a subsequent study, and b) investigated how the number of characters in the VR environment would influence FAA responses. Additionally, we compared FAA to self-reported affective responses to the four conditions (one character, low FAA; one character, high FAA; four characters, low FAA; four characters, high FAA). In this way, our research seeks to better understand objective and subjective emotional responses in VR. Results suggest that annotated FAA may not inform FAA responses to affective animations in a subsequent study when more characters are present. However, self-reported affective responses to the four conditions is in line with FAA annotated responses. We offer suggestions for the development of specific affective experiences in VR which are based on preliminary brain activity data.