Virtual Reality “Space Agent” as a Socially Interactive Design Partner: A study investigating users’ perception of and interaction with Socially Interactive Virtual Environment (SIVE) as a design partner

“Socially Interactive Virtual Environment” (SIVE) refers to a reconfigurable virtual environment that is perceived and interacted with as a socially intelligent agent. SIVE is a subset of “Space Agents”, which refers to intelligent or interactive agents that are both environmental (i.e. capable of reconfiguring virtual or physical spaces/environments) and human-like in (at least some of) their behavior. In this paper, we first proposed the concept of SIVE, and then explored the intricate human-SIVE interactions in the context of design partnership through empirical studies. More specifically, through the empirical studies, we aim to gain a preliminary understanding of how users perceive SIVE's social and environmental communications when SIVE is trying to play the role of a design partner, and how such user perceptions may shape the human-SIVE design partnership. Harnessing Unreal Engine, we designed and developed a virtual environment that used various visual and auditory modalities to interact with users and employed the Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) technique to conduct in-lab experiments with 10 participants. The participants' perspectives and interactions were video recorded, and then carefully reviewed and analyzed by multiple researchers. A semi-structured interview was also conducted with each participant after the WoZ experiment, with the transcripts analyzed through the grounded theory coding technique. The findings of this study contribute to a preliminary understanding of the potential benefits and challenges associated with integrating SIVE into collaborative design practices and have the potential to shape the future of human- “intelligent agent” design partnerships and co-creations, offering guidance for designers, developers, and researchers seeking to leverage the social expressiveness of a virtual space agent as a design partner.