Toward Understanding the Effects of Intelligence of a Virtual Character during an Immersive Jigsaw Puzzle Co-Solving Task

In virtual reality, creating intelligent virtual characters has been a long-lasting endeavor. However, while researchers have investigated several aspects of a virtual character’s intelligence, little attention has been paid to the impact of the implemented intelligence levels assigned to a virtual character during human–virtual character collaboration. Thus, we conducted a within-group study ( \(N=24\) ) to explore how three different intelligence levels (low vs. medium vs. high) assigned to a virtual character can impact how study participants perceive that virtual character and interact with the task they are instructed to complete. Specifically, for our study, we developed a jigsaw puzzle game and instructed our participants to solve it with the help of a virtual character. During the jigsaw puzzle solving process, we collected application logs related to how the participants executed the task and observed the virtual environment. Moreover, after each condition, we asked the participants to respond using a questionnaire that examined their social presence, how they perceived the character’s intelligence and compared it with their own, and how they rated the virtual character’s realism. Our results indicated that the different intelligence levels assigned to the virtual characters impacted participants’ responses on several variables, including co-presence, perceived intelligence, intelligence comparison, and character interaction and behavior realism. Moreover, based on the collected logged data, we found that the intelligence levels assigned to our virtual character significantly impacted the performance of our participants. Our results could be valuable to the research community for creating more engaging experiences with intelligent virtual characters for collaborative tasks in immersive environments.