Influence of Visual Appearance of Agents on Presence, Attractiveness, and Agency in Virtual Reality

The way a system in a virtual environment interacts with the user through an agent-mediated interface could potentially influence the overall perception of the system or certain aspects of it. To investigate which type of visualization influences presence, attractiveness, and sense of agency, we designed four different visualizations of agent-mediated interfaces, namely audio-only without embodiment, as an object, as an anthropomorphic object, and with a human appearance. Our results show that presence and agency are not affected by the type of visualization of the agent, while perceived attractiveness shows differences in hedonic as well as in pragmatic quality.