Perception of Masculinity and Femininity of Agent’s Appearance and Self-adaptors

This paper reports how our perception of virtual agents differ by the combination of the gender of their appearances and gestures. We examined how we perceive masculinity and femininity of agents and how our perception of agent’s gender affect our impression of the agent. Human-human interactions among Japanese undergraduate students were analyzed with respect to usage of gender-specific self-adaptors in a pre-experiment. Based on the results, a male and a female agent were animated to show these extracted self-adaptors. Evaluation of the interactions with the agents that exhibit self-adaptors typically exhibited by Japanese human male and female indicated that there are cross gender interactions between participants’ gender and agents’ gender. Male participants showed more favorable impressions on agents that display feminine self-adaptors than masculine ones performed by the female agent, while female participants showed rigorous impressions toward feminine self-adaptors. Although the obtained results were limited to one culture and narrow age range, these results implies there is a possibility that the combination of male appearance and masculine gestures is “safer” in order to facilitate neutral impressions and avoid any cross gender interactions made by the gender of human users. Designers of virtual agents should consider gender of appearance and gesture animations of virtual agents, and make them customizable according to the user’s gender and preferences.