How Embodied Conversational Agents Should Enter Your Space?

Embodied conversational agents (ECAs) capable of nonverbal behaviors have been developed to address the limitations of voice-only assistants. Research has explored their use in augmented reality (AR), suggesting they may soon interact with us more naturally in physical spaces. However, the question of how they should enter the user’s space when summoned remains under-explored. In this paper, we focused on the plausibility of ECAs’ entering action into the user’s field of view in AR. We analyzed its impact on users’ perceived social presence and functionality of the agent. Our results indicated that the plausibility of the action significantly affected social presence and had a marginal effect on perceived functionality.