Purpose

Thank you for joining this study on the naturalness of conversational avatars. Essentially, a conversational avatar is an animated human who talks with a human or another avatar. We want to study which factors contribute to humans perceiving an avatar as either "natural" (human-like) or not.

Setup

This survey will present you with several videos of the avatars "John" and "Sarah". Your focus will be John, the male avatar. Please observe him carefully while he is talking and listening to Sarah. Two videos will be presented side-by-side at the same time. You are free to start, stop, and rewatch the videos as you like. For each pair of videos, please select which video you find less natural (= artificial).

Once you selected a video, you will be presented the next pair. Note, that you can't go back to a previous pair. The buttons for selecting a video will appear after you've watched them.

You can re-watch the two videos side-by-side as often as you like by pressing the "Start" button. With the "Restart" button, you can go back to the beginning of the clip. Please note that frequently starting and stopping the videos may introduce some lag in the videos.

Notice

Your focus should lie on John's eye movement. Please stick to this as the main criterion rather than other factors, e.g. mouth movement.

For the experiment, it is necessary that you use a big enough screen to be able to watch the avatars closely. Please do not use a mobile phone for this reason.

If you experience any problems with videos not loading or displaying properly, try pressing the "Restart" button or reload the page. Sometimes the thumbnails (image shown before video is started) are black or cut off; you may ignore this.