Design and evaluation of postural interactions between users and a listening virtual agent during a simulated job interview

Postural interaction is of major importance during job interviews. While several prototypes enable users to rehearse for public speaking tasks and job interviews, few of these prototypes support subtle bodily interactions between the user and a virtual agent playing the role of an interviewer. The design of our system is informed by a multimodal corpus that was previously collected. In this paper, we explain how we were inspired by these video recordings of human interviewers to build a library of motion‐captured movements that interviewers are most likely to display. We designed a fully automatic interactive virtual agent able to display these movements in response to the bodily movements of the user. Thirty‐two participants presented themselves to this virtual agent during a simulated job interview. We focused on the self‐presentation task of the job interview, the virtual agent being listening. Participants stood on a force platform that recorded the displacements of their center of pressure to assess the postural impact of our design. We also collected video recordings of their movements and computed the contraction index and the quantity of motion of their bodies. We explain the different hypotheses that we made concerning (1) the comparison between the performance of participants with human interviewers and the performance of participants with virtual interviewers, (2) the comparison between mirror and random postural behaviors displayed by a female versus a male virtual interviewer, and (3) the correlation between the participants' performance and their personality traits. Our results suggest that users perceive the simulated self‐presentation task with the virtual interviewer as threatening and as difficult as the presentation task with the human interviewers. Furthermore, when users interact with a virtual interviewer that mirrors their postures, these users perceive the interviewer as being affiliative. Finally, a correlation analysis showed that personality traits had a significant relation to the postural behaviors and performance of the users during their presentation. System architecture for managing postural interaction during the job interview simulation