Storytelling Agents with Personality and Adaptivity

Abstract: We explore the expression of personality and adaptivity through the gestures of virtual agents in a storytelling task. We conduct two experiments using four different dialogic stories. We manipulate agent personality on the extraversion scale, whether the agents adapt to one another in their gestural performance and agent gender. Our results show that subjects are able to perceive the intended variation in extraversion between different virtual agents, independently of the story they are telling and the gender of the agent. A second study shows that subjects also prefer adaptive to nonadaptive virtual agents.