A researcher in Lancaster University’s School of Computing and Communications has discovered that the appearance, movement, and sound of virtual characters affect where users focus their attention during storytelling in augmented reality (AR).

Research completed by Dr Florian Weidner, alongside a team from Technische Universität Ilmenau in Germany, also found that cartoon-like characters attract more attention than realistic ones. The team’s research additionally found that movement matters, while different types of audio had little impact. These findings can help improve AR experiences where it’s important for users to focus on the storyteller.

The study involved participants standing in a room where an AR agent tells a story. They could be of low realism or highly realistic. The participant could hear the voice in either a non-spatial way like a pair of headphones, or spatially with the sounds coming from all around them. The agent also moved either from left to right, or in a circle. The participants’ gaze behaviour, or more simply, where they chose to focus their attention, was then analysed to give the results.

Gaze behaviour during interactions with AR characters has hardly been investigated until now. However, it is highly relevant to this research as it shows the different ways in which, and how well, people engage with a character during storytelling. This is important research for a range of different industries as they work to make visual storytelling more appealing and meeting the needs of the end user are going to be even more important over time. These insights could have further applications soon as AR is an increasingly utilised area. One example is where a human-like narrator could be part of an interactive display or offer instruction for key skills. Training and entertainment are both growing industries where information presented in this way might be particularly useful.

Dr Weidner said: “Virtual characters in AR have a huge potential to provide a human-like narrator. This could be for a guide in a museum, a teacher or instructor, or simply someone telling you a bedtime story. Exploring this is fascinating and we hope that we can look into this in detail in the future in more realistic settings in the wild and not just in the laboratory."