Abstract
In this study, we focused on body location and orientation of an embodied agent to develop equal social relationship between a user and an embodied agent. We conducted a psychological experiment focusing on body orientation of the embodied agent, and the agent's location based on depth-dimensional virtual space partitioning. Moreover, we also considered gender difference in this experiment since preference of body arrangement in human dyadic conversation should depend on gender. Experiment 1 (N=48) was conducted to examine how body arrangement of an embodied agent influenced task performance of picture recognition task of participants and evaluation of impression of the agent by the participants considering gender difference. Additionally, experiment 2 (N=51) was conducted to investigate the influence of body orientation of the agent on the recognition of user-agent distance. These experimental results suggested that male users should prefer more distantly recognized user distance, being compared with female users. This implication indicates further investigation of design of embodied agents considering influence of the body arrangement on a user due to gender difference.
