Designing Non-Humanoid Virtual Assistants for Task-Oriented AR Environments

In task-oriented Augmented Reality (AR), humanoid Embodied Conversational Agents can enhance the feeling of social presence and reduce mental workload. Yet, such agents can also introduce social biases and lead to distractions. This presents a challenge for AR applications that require the user to concentrate mainly on a task environment. To address this, we introduce a non-humanoid virtual assistant designed for minimal visual intrusion in AR. Our approach aims to enhance a user's focus on the tasks they need to perform. We explain our design choices based on previously published guidelines and describe our prototype implemented for an optical-see-through headset.