Embedding the Awareness State and Response State in an Image-Based Avatar to Start Natural User Interaction

We propose a method for embedding the awareness state and response state in an image-based avatar to smoothly and automatically start an interaction with a user. When both states are not embedded, the image-based avatar can become non-responsive or slow to respond. To consider the beginning of an interaction, we observed the behaviors between a user and receptionist in an information center. Our method replayed the behaviors of the receptionist at appropriate times in each state of the image-based avatar. Experimental results demonstrate that, at the beginning of the interaction, our method for embedding the awareness state and response state increased subjective scores more than not embedding the states.