Exploring behaviour towards avatars and agents in immersive virtual environments with mixed-agency interactions

Immersive virtual environments (IVEs) in which multiple users nav-igate by walking and interact with each other in natural ways areperfectly suited for team applications from training to recreation. Atthe same time, they can solve scheduling conflicts by employingvirtual agents in place of missing team members or additional par-ticipants of a scenario. While this idea has been long discussed inIVEs research there are no prior publications on social interactionsin systems with multiple embodied users and agents. This paperpresents an experiment at a work-in-progress stage that addressesthe impact of perceived agency and control of a virtual character ina collaborative scenario with two embodied users and one virtualagent. Our future study will investigate whether users treat avatarsand agents differently within a mixed-agency scenario, analysingseveral behavioural metrics and self-report of participants