`Baymax' or `RoboCop'? Exploring Different Feminine Avatar Personalities for Shared Automated Vehicles

Shared automated vehicles (SAVs) will offer a lot of benefits, from improving the overall mobility to environmental benefits. However, perceived security in SAVs is a major concern and may influence their acceptance and adoption negatively. To address this, we propose a digital companion (DC) concept embodied as an avatar inside the vehicle to accompany passengers in substitution of a human driver. In a co-creation workshop with participants (N = 6) we collected ideas about the appearance and personality of such DCs and derived two contrasting concepts (‘Baymax’ and ‘RoboCop’). Inspired by a design space from the gaming context, we implemented the two DCs and evaluated them in a VR study (N = 23) experiencing two scenarios in SAVs. The results show that a DC improves passengers’ perceived security. Generally, the ‘Baymax’ companion was preferred in both scenarios but no correlation between scenario and preferred personality type could be determined.