Comparing Visual Attention with Leading and Following Virtual Agents in a Collaborative Perception-Action Task in VR

This paper presents a within-subject study to investigate the effects of leading and following behaviors on user visual attention behaviors when collaborating with a virtual agent (VA) during performing transportation tasks in immersive virtual environments. The task was to carry a target object from a location to a predefined location. There were two conditions, namely leader VA (LVA) and follower VA (FVA). The leader gave instructions to the follower to perform actions. In the FVA condition, users played the leader role, while they played the follower role in the LVA condition. The users and the VA communicated via spoken language. During the experiment, participants wore a head-mounted display and performed real walking in a room. In each condition, each participant performed 20 trials of object transportation for different types of objects. Our preliminary results revealed significant differences in the user visual attention behaviors between the follower and leader VA conditions during the transportation tasks.