Visual Style of Embodied Virtual Sales Agents

Introduction

In a traditional commerce environment, customers seek the social connection and personal consultation afforded by face-to-face interaction with company representatives. However, these elements are noticeably absent in an e-commerce website; thus making it cold, distant, and impersonal. This issue is one of the factors that drive the academia and industry to take interest in embodied virtual agents, as they are regarded as potential sources of social presence (Qiu and Bensabat, 2009; Mimoun and Poncin, 2015; Liew et al., 2017). Embodied virtual agents are computer-generated characters that are equipped with facial expressions, body animations, and spoken / text dialogues. Simulating the roles of a customer representative, embodied virtual agents delivers greetings, facilitates website navigation, provides answers to FAQ, and offers product recommendations (McGoldrick et al., 2008).

Through the portrayal of rich social cues, virtual agents induce higher perceptions of social presence and trust in online shoppers (Chattaraman et al., 2014; Beldad et.al., 2016; Liew et al., 2017). Given that humans tend to form initial impressions and social judgements on others based on visual channel; it is therefore not surprising that the graphical designs of embodied virtual agents have been shown to influence affective and behavioural aspects of online shopping (Beldad et.al., 2016; Qiu and Benbasat, 2010). One of the theoretical premise commonly used and advocated in human-agent interaction research is the computer are social actors (CASA) paradigm (Nass and Moon, 2000). The CASA asserts that people will mindlessly apply social rules to computer agents the same way as they do to their fellow humans. Within this framework, the principles of social psychology i.e., emotional contagion (Tsai et al., 2012; KräMer et al., 2013; Liew et al., 2016; Liew et al., 2017), stereotyping (Liew et al., 2013; Liew and Tan, 2018; Rosenberg-Kima et al., 2008), and personality attribution (Siddique et at., 2017; Liew and Tan, 2016) have been recently investigated in relations to embodied virtual agents. The outcomes of these studies provided new insights and recommendations that inform the designs of digital characters in digital domains.