Perception of Virtual Audiences: Influence of Gender and Nonverbal Behavior

Virtual Reality (VR) has demonstrated its potential as a training and education tool through its immersive capabilities. Combined with Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs), applications for acquiring public speaking skills have notably been developed to replicate distressing social situations, yet crucial in one’s life.
The training experience can be tailored to the users' needs by manipulating the IVAs’ behavior. However, building challenging and immersive experiences requires in-depth knowledge of how virtual agents are perceived.
In this context, the present article investigates the perception of medium-sized virtual audiences’ valence and arousal in VR. A total of 35 audience conditions were considered, varying in IVAs’ gender and nonverbal behavior, and were evaluated by 70 participants to assess the influence of these characteristics on user perception.
Specifically, 7 attitude types were designed, assigning distinctive behaviors to each IVA to convey the desired levels of valence and arousal. Additionally, 5 variations in audience gender composition were included.
Overall, this study provides valuable guidelines for designing virtual audiences by identifying validated attitudes associated with specific valence and arousal levels. Notably, 4 out of the 7 designed attitudes successfully elicited the intended perception ratings. The misperception of some attitudes reflects the complexity of designing virtual audiences using a priori characteristics drawn from the literature. Importantly, the attitude types remained valid regardless of the audience gender composition, as no significant influence of gender on perception was observed.