The Neighbor in My Left Hand: Development and Evaluation of an Integrative Agent System With Two Different Devices

We propose a new wearable agent, “FinU (Friend in You),” based on the hypothesis that inducing social facilitation effect, i.e., the effect of having other agents around to increase the task performance, is possible, even for wearable agents with a single sensory modality, by establishing beliefs about the agent in advance. Our agent system, FinU, consists of two devices: FinU-Box, a box-shaped device that synchronizes visual, auditory, and tactile stimuli to represent an agent living on the user’s hand, and the FinU-Band, a wearable device worn on the hand with a sensory modality limited to tactile stimuli. In this study, in addition to the development of the system, we also conducted preliminarily evaluation by dividing the participants into two experimental conditions: one in which subjects interacted with the agent using the FinU-Box beforehand, and one in which participants did not use the FinU-Band. By having the user learn beliefs about the agent from the FinU-Box, it was expected that the user would attribute higher presence to the agent than if they had not learned beliefs. Participants were then tested on a continuous performance task to measure the effect of social facilitation, which was expected to improve performance, and their performance was compared across conditions. We assumed that higher performance indicated a stronger sense of agent presence. The results showed that the social facilitation effect was stronger for participants who had experienced the FinU-Box beforehand, as they responded more accurately to the task stimuli. This suggests that our system, which combining a device that presents a rich sensory experience with a wearable device that presents a single sensory experience would allow the agent’s presence to be more strongly felt by the user.