Interaction between humans and virtual agents is becoming increasingly prevalent. This research investigates the influence of virtual agents on users' opinions within a virtual stand-up comedy club setting, focusing on the socio-psychological mechanisms of emotional contagion and group conformity. We aimed to combine these two areas in a novel study approach. To this end, we designed and conducted an exploratory pilot study in which participants ($\mathrm{N}=20$) rated the funniness of jokes in VR, under varying conditions of virtual agent laughter (absence, medium intensity, strong intensity). Our analysis shows a significant positive linear effect on the log odds of higher funniness ratings when virtual agents exhibit laughter. Moreover, our study shows that this effect is mainly due to emotional contagion processes, individual differences in susceptibility to group conformity, and the interaction of both concepts, showing that emotional contagion happens only when the individual susceptibility to group conformity is high. The results offer valuable insights into the social impact of VR environments and the potential of virtual agents to shape user perception and opinion.

Sensorimotor contingencies (SC) refer to the rules by which we use our body to perceive. It has been argued that to the extent that a virtual reality (VR) application affords natural SC so the greater likelihood that participants will experience Place Illusion (PI), the illusion of 'being there' (a component of presence) in the virtual environment. However, notwithstanding numerous studies this only has anecdotal support. Here we used a reinforcement learning (RL) paradigm where 26 participants experienced a VR scenario where the RL agent could sequentially propose changes to 5 binary factors: mono or stereo vision, 3 or 6 degrees of freedom head tracking, mono or spatialised sound, low or high display resolution, or one of two color schemes. The first 4 are SC, whereas the last is not. Participants could reject or accept each change proposed by the RL, until convergence. Participants were more likely to accept changes from low to high SC than changes to the color. Additionally, theory suggests that increased PI should be associated with lower eye scanpath entropy. Our results show that mean entropy did decrease over time and the final level of entropy was negatively correlated with a post exposure questionnaire-based assessment of PI.

Virtual Reality (VR) content production is now a flourishing industry. The specifics of VR, as opposed to videogames or movies, allow for a content format where users experience, at the same time, the narrative richness characteristic of movies and theatre plays with interactive engagement. To create such a content format some technical challenges still need to be solved, the main being the need for a new generation of animation engines that can deliver interactive characters appropriate for narrative-focused VR interactive content. We review the main assumptions of this approach and recent progress in interactive character animation techniques that seems promising to realise this goal.

Creating interactive characters is one of the most challenging tasks of videogame design. In order to facilitate such an endeavor, we introduce a decisional and behavior synthesis architecture integrated in the game engine Unity3D. A distinguishing feature of this architecture is that it embraces embodied cognition principles and uses them as implementation requirements. From these, we derive an architecture, which is based on a novel combination of previously proposed systems, together with some simplifications. We also argue that the architecture proposed has properties-modularity, scalability, and stability-which can be beneficial for its practical industrial adoption, particularly in the context of the recent improvement in machine learning techniques. Artificial intelligence is a quite technical domain, and we believe such a tool can facilitate interactive character creation by creative minds in industrial applications.

An experiment was carried out to examine the impact on electrodermal activity of people when approached by groups of one or four virtual characters at varying distances. It was premised on the basis of proxemics theory that the closer the approach of the virtual characters to the participant, the greater the level of physiological arousal. Physiological arousal was measured by the number of skin conductance responses within a short time period after the approach, and the maximum change in skin conductance level 5 s after the approach. The virtual characters were each either female or a cylinder of human size, and one or four characters approached each subject a total of 12 times. Twelve male subjects were recruited for the experiment. The results suggest that the number of skin conductance responses after the approach and the change in skin conductance level increased the closer the virtual characters approached toward the participants. Moreover, these response variables were inversely correlated with the number of visits, showing a typical adaptation effect. There was some evidence to suggest that the number of characters who simultaneously approached (one or four) was positively associated with the responses. Surprisingly there was no evidence of a difference in response between the humanoid characters and cylinders on the basis of this physiological data. It is suggested that the similarity in this quantitative arousal response to virtual characters and virtual objects might mask a profound difference in qualitative response, an interpretation supported by questionnaire and interview results. Overall the experiment supported the premise that people exhibit heightened physiological arousal the closer they are approached by virtual characters.