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User Perceptions of Communicative and Task-competent Agents in a Virtual Basketball Game

In this paper, we describe a virtual basketball game where a human and an embodied agent can play together 
 
as a team. Our goal is to investigate whether the human prefers an agent who is highly competent at basketball 
 
or one which is not as competent but tries to actively communicate through body movements. The virtual 
 
basketball game was implemented using a Kinect to sense body movements and a pressure sensor for handsfree 
 
navigation. In order to create an agent who could react to a userâs body movements, we designed an 
 
agent model based on joint activity theory. We performed an experiment where participants would play virtual 
 
basketball with each agent and evaluated them through questionnaires. It was found that participants preferred 
 
the agent which tried to communicate more with the user, even though they could distinguish that the other 
 
agent was better at playing basketball. We propose that communication capability for these types of agents is 
 
crucial, even at the expense of some task ability.