The opportunities to receive and provide services on virtual environment (VE) continue to increase. In this study, we focused on the voice in VE, and investigated the effects of whisper voice, which is used in intimate relationships, on interpersonal distance between salesperson and customer and the effective range of ventriloquism effect. The experimental results showed two results when the salesperson used whisper voice. The interpersonal distance between them was significantly smaller than that of the normal voice. The effective range of the ventriloquism effect was significantly larger on the front side and significantly smaller on the backside compared to normal voice.

In order to construct a comfortable communication in the VR space, it is important to improve the speech comprehension in environmental noise. Although there have been many reports on the interaction between vision and acoustic, few studies using noisy VR spaces. In this study, sixteen Japanese male and female were tested to listen to a some sentence in a VR space with environmental noise, to evaluate the effect of the visual stimulus to the avatar speech comprehension against the environmental noise, with using the up-and-down method. The results showed that the cocktail party effect was also observed in the VR avatars, and the cocktail party effect continued even if the avatar vanished visually. In addition, it was suggested that the cocktail party effect was enhanced if the lip of the avatar synchronized correctly.

In this study, we propose a sensor network to estimate service reassurance in a store by estimating customer stress level based on a pulse wave. We developed a basket that can calculate an RR interval (RRI) with sufficient accuracy to estimate customer reassurance from the measured pulse wave under in-store conditions. Two processes were applied to the measurement values based on the assumption that certain circumstances may interfere with measuring pulse waves. Furthermore, the authors conducted pulse wave measurement experiments under simulated store conditions. The results showed RRIs' values with an error rate of 4.9% compared to the true value.