Exploring the Appearance and Voice Mismatch of Virtual Characters.

We know that a voice that matches the appearance of a virtual character can positively impact how people interact with that character. However, although virtual characters and the human interactions with them have become more common, how mismatches in the appearance and voice of virtual characters could impact aspects of human perception toward virtual characters is underexplored. Thus, we conducted a 2 (appearance: human vs. robot virtual character) × 2 (voice: human vs. robot voice) within-group virtual reality study (N = 21) to explore how appearance and voice factors could impact how study participants rate the anthropomorphism, animacy, likability, perceived intelligence, and perceived safety of virtual characters. In our study, we instructed our participants to co-solve a jigsaw puzzle with the help of a virtual character, which we scripted to solve the jigsaw puzzle as efficiently as possible. Our results showed that in the presence of a human voice, the mismatching in the appearance and voice of the virtual character could still provide positive results in anthropomorphism, likability, and perceived safety, indicating that the human voice plays a critical enhancing role in how humans perceive a virtual character that is non-human in appearance.