"\"It patted my arm\": Investigating Social Touch from a Virtual Agent"

Endowing socially interactive virtual agents with the social touch modality could improve their emotional communication abilities and help them bond with human users. Touch is however a sensitive channel of communication that can have negative effects if used inappropriately. We present a first implementation of a system enabling an agent to perform social touch-based interactions and a preliminary study of the system dedicated to determining the factors that come into play for the social acceptability of an agent-initiated touch. The relationship between social touch with a virtual agent and sense of embodiment is also discussed. Based on the results of the study, we propose social (macro) and practical (micro) insights into how to produce meaningful, coherent and acceptable touch decisions (when to touch or not depending on the situation).