Human—Technology Interaction: The State-of-the-Art and the Lack of Naturalism

The current chapter serves as a state-of-the-art, presenting the limitations of the existing technology used in the broad area of human–computer interaction up to now. Although different kind of agents have been used to contribute to several domains, like education, health, entertainment, both in virtual and physical environments, the virtual character or robot that will make a human feel as comfortable as interacting with another human has not been reported yet. What is mainly missing from the up to date state-of-the-art is the direct comparison of all these technologies with the original human–human communication. What we need to do is to keep studying the human–human communication and not only features of the HCI as what is missing is how we, as humans, react in several contexts of communication. Through this kind of research, we can contribute to the enhancement of naturalism of every kind of agent, offering a higher level of understanding and affection in the context of everyday communication.