About this Research Topic

Background

Virtual Reality (VR) has opened possibilities for creating a wide variety of environments, ranging from those that replicate real environments and user actions within them to those that are impossible in the real world and provide users with extraordinary, super-human capabilities. However, whatever the nature of the virtual environment, the possibility of plausible social interactions within it is one of the most powerful aspects brought about by VR. Indeed, we are not usually alone in real life, so VR users also expect to have a social experience, either by engaging with other users or by interacting with virtual agents. With that, the creation and evaluation of virtual agents that can populate virtual worlds become a crucial aspect of VR research.

When designing VR environments with social interactions, the goal is to create a strong sense of social presence, i.e. the "sense of being with another". Online social VR platforms provide physically distant users with virtual embodiment and enable social presence through voice communication, chats and some form of embodied interactions. However, reaching a complex and scalable metaverse continuously populated by users remains a challenge, and many contexts of VR do not require such an environment. The necessary social interactions and a sufficient level of social presence could be achieved by deploying virtual agents, which could even be chat models embodied as virtual agents. Within this research topic, we would like to gather research contributions that, on one hand, improve the behavioural realism of virtual agents and, on the other hand, study user actions in the context of social interactions with virtual agents and their reactions to agent behaviour. We are equally interested in technical contributions to the design of virtual agents and their behaviours and in more psychologically-rooted experiments in the context of human-virtual agent interaction and communication.

Several challenges remain open in the context of the design of virtual agents for VR worlds and their influence on social interactions and user perceptions and emotions. We invite researchers to submit their contributions both on the technical design of virtual agents and on user experiments investigating or validating specific design choices. All aspects of virtual agent design and user response are of interest, such as verbal and non-verbal communication and behaviour, neural response, and cognitive activities.

For technically-focused contributions, our topics of interest include but are not limited to:
- Virtual agents' appearance, behaviour and their influence on user immersion and sense of social presence.
- Virtual agents' ability to autonomously perform actions and take decisions.
- Virtual agents' ability to interact with one another and embodied users, ineffective, natural, and realistic ways.
- Virtual agents' ability to convey emotions and display distinct personality traits.
- Virtual agents' ability to non-verbally and verbally communicate, e.g., through the integration of large bodily and language models in virtual social agents.

For contributions focusing on user experiments, our topics of interest include but are not limited to:
- The effects of virtual agent characteristics (appearance, behaviours, communication styles) on user behaviours and perceptions related to presence, social presence, and engagement.
- The comparisons between user behaviours and perceptions when interacting with virtual agents and when interacting with other users in the physical world.
- The comparisons between user behaviours and perceptions when interacting with virtual agents and other embodied users in VR.

Keywords: Virtual reality, virtual agents, virtual humans, agent behaviours, human behaviours, social interactions

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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