Exploring How Social Context Aware NPCs Change User Presence and Engagement in VR Experiences

著者: Anders Lucassen Lund, Jakob Krogsgaard Pedersen, Markus Birch Flensborg, Rikke Bragh Jensen, Tze Huo Gucci Ho, Ivan Nikolov - Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Computer Graphics, Interaction and Visualization Theory and Applications 2026 被引用: 0

Enhancing immersion and believability in VR experiences can improve learning, adherence to instructions, and overall user experience. An often overlooked factor is contextual social norm interaction between NPCs and users. NPCs are typically used for exposition, limiting immersion and presence. This paper explores how context-aware social interactions impact user experience and presence. We created an office scenario with a task list and two NPC versions: one that responds to user actions, context, and proximity, and one that does not. We also propose a custom presence questionnaire for detecting how users’ behavior, immersion and presence change when interacting with the two version. Results show that the context-aware NPCs make users more hesitant to explore and interact, leading to a quicker sense of frustration, but also increases social presence and the feeling of being there. The paper is an explorative study into developing more reactive NPCs for games that have internal moods that guide how they emote, react and communicate with users, based on users’ actions