[Colloquium] Spencer Ng MS Presentation/May 18, 2023

[Jessica Garza]

This is an announcement of Spencer Ng's MS Presentation

Spencer Ng is a student in the Bx/MS program.

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Date: Thursday, May 18, 2023

Time: 3 PM, CST

Location: JCL 298

M.S. Candidate: Spencer Ng

M.S. Paper Title: Role-Playing with Robot Characters: Gamification and Narrative Agency for Increasing User Engagement

Advisor: Sarah Sebo

Committee Members: Sarah Sebo, Ken Nakagaki, Heather Zheng

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Abstract:

Live interactive entertainment is moving towards a greater participatory culture, with dynamic stories told through audience interaction. Robot characters offer a unique opportunity to mitigate the challenges of creating personalized entertainment at scale compared to human actors, as they can be automated and thus continually perform for small audience groups. In a between-subjects user study, we created an immersive storytelling experience where users role-play as a detective with two distinct robot characters where users either (1) primarily watch the two robots converse, (2) have a greater degree of narrative agency by talking with the robots in-character, or (3) have a more active role in playing games and puzzles. Our results show how manipulating the type and degree of user agency in a role-playing scenario with multi-party human-robot interaction can affect users' flow state, sense of immersion, engagement, and perception of the robots during the experience. These findings can be extended to broader interactions with robots where role-playing in stories and increasing user agency can be incorporated, such as for educational or health robots.

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Jessica Garza
Assistant Director of Undergraduate Studies
Department of Computer Science
The University of Chicago
John Crerar Library 374
Office: (773) 702-2336

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