Kunal Gupta

With the advancement of Artificial Intelligence technology to make smart devices, understanding how humans develop trust in virtual agents is emerging as a critical research field. Through our research, we report on a novel methodology to investigate user’s trust in auditory assistance in a Virtual Reality (VR) based search task, under both high and low cognitive load and under varying levels of agent accuracy. We collected physiological sensor data such as electroencephalography (EEG), galvanic skin response (GSR), and heart-rate variability (HRV), subjective data through questionnaire such as System Trust Scale (STS), Subjective Mental Effort Questionnaire (SMEQ) and NASA-TLX. We also collected a behavioral measure of trust (congruency of users’ head motion in response to valid/ invalid verbal advice from the agent). Our results indicate that our custom VR environment enables researchers to measure and understand human trust in virtual agents using the matrices, and both cognitive load and agent accuracy play an important role in trust formation. We discuss the implications of the research and directions for future work.

Brain synchronicity is a neurological phenomena where two or more individuals have their brain activation in phase when performing a shared activity. We present NeuralDrum, an extended reality (XR) drumming experience that allows two players to drum together while their brain signals are simultaneously measured. We calculate the Phase Locking Value (PLV) to determine their brain synchronicity and use this to directly affect their visual and auditory experience in the game, creating a closed feedback loop. In a pilot study, we logged and analysed the users’ brain signals as well as had them answer a subjective questionnaire regarding their perception of synchronicity with their partner and the overall experience. From the results, we discuss design implications to further improve NeuralDrum and propose methods to integrate brain synchronicity into interactive experiences.

Recent pandemic-related contact restrictions have made it difficult for musicians to meet in person to make music. As a result, there has been an increased demand for applications that enable remote and real-time music collaboration. One desirable goal here is to give musicians a sense of social presence, to make them feel that they are “on site” with their musical partners. We conducted a focus group study to investigate the impact of remote jamming on users' affect. Further, we gathered user requirements for a Mixed Reality system that enables real-time jamming and developed a prototype based on these findings.

In this paper, we share real-time collaborative gaze behaviours, hand pointing, gesturing, and heart rate visualisations between remote collaborators using a live 360 ° panoramic-video based Mixed Reality (MR) system. We first ran a pilot study to explore visual designs to combine communication cues with biofeedback (heart rate), aiming to understand user perceptions of empathic collaboration. We then conducted a formal study to investigate the effect of modality (Gaze+Hand, Hand-only) and interface (Near-Gaze, Embodied). The results show that the Gaze+Hand modality in a Near-Gaze interface is significantly better at reducing task load, improving co-presence, enhancing understanding and tightening collaborative behaviours compared to the conventional Embodied hand-only experience. Ranked as the most preferred condition, the Gaze+Hand in Near-Gaze condition is perceived to reduce the need for dividing attention to the collaborator’s physical location, although it feels slightly less natural compared to the embodied visualisations. In addition, the Gaze+Hand conditions also led to more joint attention and less hand pointing to align mutual understanding. Lastly, we provide a design guideline to summarize what we have learned from the studies on the representation between modality, interface, and biofeedback.

In this poster, we present a live 360° panoramic-video based empathic Mixed Reality (MR) collaboration system that shares various Near-Gaze non-verbal communication cues including gaze, hand pointing, gesturing, and heart rate visualisations in real-time. The preliminary results indicate that the interface with the partner’s communication cues visualised close to the gaze point allows users to focus without dividing attention to the collaborator’s physical body movements yet still effectively communicate. Shared gaze visualisations coupled with deictic languages are primarily used to affirm joint attention and mutual understanding, while hand pointing and gesturing are used as secondary. Our approach provides a new way to help enable effective remote collaboration through varied empathic communication visualisations and modalities which covers different task properties and spatial setups.

With face-to-face music collaboration being severely limited during the recent pandemic, mixed reality technologies and their potential to provide musicians a feeling of "being there" with their musical partner can offer tremendous opportunities. In order to assess this potential, we conducted a laboratory study in which musicians made music together in real-time while simultaneously seeing their jamming partner’s mixed reality point cloud via a head-mounted display and compared mental effects such as flow, affect, and co-presence to an audio-only baseline. In addition, we tracked the musicians’ physiological signals and evaluated their features during times of self-reported flow. For users jamming in mixed reality, we observed a significant increase in co-presence. Regardless of the condition (mixed reality or audio-only), we observed an increase in positive affect after jamming remotely. Furthermore, we identified heart rate and HF/LF as promising features for classifying the flow state musicians experienced while making music together.

Related research has shown that collaborating with Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) embodied in Augmented Reality (AR) or Virtual Reality (VR) can improve task performance and reduce task load. Human cognition and behaviors are controlled by brain activities, which can be captured and reflected by Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. However, little research has been done to understand users’ cognition and behaviors using EEG while interacting with IVAs embodied in AR and VR environments. In this paper, we investigate the impact of the virtual agent’s multimodal communication in VR on users’ EEG signals as measured by alpha band power. We develop a desert survival game where the participants make decisions collaboratively with the virtual agent in VR. We evaluate three different communication methods based on a within-subject pilot study: 1) a Voice-only Agent, 2) an Embodied Agent with speech and gaze, and 3) a Gestural Agent with a gesture pointing at the object while talking about it. No significant difference was found in the EEG alpha band power. However, the alpha band ERD/ERS calculated around the moment when the virtual agent started speaking indicated providing a virtual body for the sudden speech could avoid the abrupt attentional demand when the agent started speaking. Moreover, a sudden gesture coupled with the speech induced more attentional demands, even though the speech was matched with the virtual body. This work is the first to explore the impact of IVAs’ interaction methods in VR on users’ brain activity, and our findings contribute to the IVAs interaction design.

There is little research on how Virtual Reality (VR) applications can identify and respond meaningfully to users' emotional changes. In this paper, we investigate the impact of Context-Aware Empathic VR (CAEVR) on the emotional and cognitive aspects of user experience in VR. We developed a real-time emotion prediction model using electroencephalography (EEG), electrodermal activity (EDA), and heart rate variability (HRV) and used this in personalized and generalized models for emotion recognition. We then explored the application of this model in a context-aware empathic (CAE) virtual agent and an emotion-adaptive (EA) VR environment. We found a significant increase in positive emotions, cognitive load, and empathy toward the CAE agent, suggesting the potential of CAEVR environments to refine user-agent interactions. We identify lessons learned from this study and directions for future work.