The prospect of machine consciousness cultivates controversy across media, academia, and industry. Assessing whether non-experts perceive technologies as conscious, and exploring the consequences of this perception, are yet unaddressed challenges in Human Computer Interaction (HCI). To address them, we surveyed 100 people, exploring their conceptualisations of consciousness and if and how they perceive consciousness in currently available interactive technologies. We show that many people already perceive a degree of consciousness in GPT-3, a voice chat bot, and a robot vacuum cleaner. Within participant responses we identified dynamic tensions between denial and speculation, thinking and feeling, interaction and experience, control and independence, and rigidity and spontaneity. These tensions can inform future research into perceptions of machine consciousness and the challenges it represents for HCI. With both empirical and theoretical contributions, this paper emphasises the importance of HCI in an era of machine consciousness, real, perceived or denied.

Virtual Reality experiences and games present believable virtual environments based on graphical quality, spatial audio, and interactivity. The interaction with in-game characters, controlled by computers (agents) or humans (avatars), is an important part of VR experiences. Pre-captured motion sequences increase the visual humanoid resemblance. However, this still precludes realistic social interactions (eye contact, imitation of body language), particularly for agents. We aim to make social interaction more realistic via social touch. Social touch is non-verbal, conveys feelings and signals (coexistence, closure, intimacy). In our research, we created an artificial hand to apply social touch in a repeatable and controlled fashion to investigate its effect on the perceived human-likeness of avatars and agents. Our results show that social touch is effective to further blur the boundary between computer- and human-controlled virtual characters and contributes to experiences that closely resemble human-to-human interactions.