High Levels of Visibility of Virtual Agents Increase the Social Presence of Users

Virtual humanoid agents can perform a variety of tasks, and their representation has an influence on several psychological aspects. We compared the effects of agent visibility during an anagram solving task in virtual reality on social presence and cognitive task performance. We increased the visibility from (i) voice-only, (ii) mouth-only, (iii) full head, (iv) upper body, to (v) full body representations of the same virtual agent in a within-subject design study. The re-sults revealed significant differences in the perceived social presence, especially for the two least visible representations, i.e., voice- and mount -only, but no significant effects on task performance could be found.