Healthcare simulators are learning environments that offer many training opportunities. The integration of expressive virtual patients in these simulators encourages the exchanges and provokes emotional reactions in the learner, which promotes memorization and learning. Based on these elements, we assume that the facial expressiveness of a virtual agent is a factor to be considered in order to improve the user experience. We investigate the impact of the facial expressiveness of virtual humans on the empathy induction in the user of health simulators. We also investigate the impact of facial expressiveness on the user’s sense of similarity and the affective bond with the agent. Our results show a high empathy score when users train with simulators. Depending on the context, we observe a significant difference in perspective-taking in favor of the users who interact with an expressive virtual agent to a virtual agent without facial expressiveness.

Improving the expressiveness of virtual humans is essential for qualitative interactions and development of an emotional bond. It is certainly indicated for all applications using the user's cognitive processes, such as applications dedicated to training or health. Our study aims to contribute to the design of an expressive virtual human, by identifying and adapting visual factors promoting transcription of emotions. In this paper, we investigate the effect of expressive wrinkles and variation of pupil size. We propose to compare the recognition of basic emotions on a real human and on an expressive virtual human. The virtual human was subject to two different factors: expressive wrinkles and/or pupil size. Our results indicate that emotion recognition rates on the virtual agent are high. Moreover, expressive wrinkles affect emotion recognition. The effect of pupillary size is less significant. However, both are recommended to design an expressive virtual human.

This paper describes an experiment conducted to study the influence of visual appearance of user's avatar (or 3D cursor) on the manipulation of virtual objects in virtual environments (VE). Participants were asked to pick up a virtual cube and place it at a random location in a VE. We found that one visual property of the avatar (the presence or absence of a directional cue) could influence the way participants picked up the cube in the VE. When using an avatar or a 3D cursor with a strong directional cue (e.g., arrows pointing to the left or right), participants generally picked up the cube by a specific side (e.g., right or left side). When using 3D cursors with no main directional cue, participants more frequently picked up the virtual cube by its front or top