Speaking with avatars - influence of social interaction on movement behavior in interactive hearing experiments

This study investigated to what extent social interaction influences the motion behavior of normal-hearing listeners in interactive hearing experiments involving audiovisual virtual reality. To answer this question, an experiment with eleven participants was performed, using two different levels of virtualization, two levels of interactivity, and two different noise levels. The task of the participants was either to communicate with two real or two virtual interlocutors (conditions ’real’ and ’active’) or to listen passively to a conversation between three virtual characters (condition ’passive’). During the experiment, the gaze, head and body motion of the participants was recorded. An analysis of variances showed that the gaze and saccade behavior does not differ between ’real’ and ’active’ conditions. Behavior was found to be different between ’active’ and ’passive’ conditions. For the head motion related parameters, such a significant effect was not found. A classifier was trained to distinguish between conditions based on motion and pose features. Performance was higher for the comparison between ’active’ and ’passive’ conditions than for the comparison between ’real’ and ’active’ conditions, indicating that the measured difference in motion behavior was not sufficient to distinguish between the ’real’ and the ’active’ condition.